iv. reflectiveness

IV . REFLECT IVENESS

Crossing the Atlantic

As i left britain for the United States in the summer of 1979,some weeks after the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservativegovernment, the world may have been changing, but the intellectualbearings seemed secure. With hindsight, we can see the solid groundof materialism cracking and shifting. As I suggested in chapter 3,between 1977–78 and 1982–83, such in›uential individuals asWilliam Sewell and Gareth Stedman Jones were already breakingranks, though not yet disavowing what came before. Most social his-torians certainly didn’t perceive any crisis in what they were doing.The process of institutionalizing, country by country, was still young.In Britain, for example, the freshly established Social History Societyand the new ›agship journals for the emerging generation of thirty-somethings, Social History and History Workshop Journal, weren’t yetfour years old.1 By the end of the seventies, the disciplinary battles forsocial history’s legitimacy—in terms of hiring, curriculum, graduatetraining, and the general mood of the profession—had only recentlybegun. Troubling the underlying project with fresh fronts of self-crit-icism, querying gains that were still under contention, was hardly highon the agenda.

There were certainly declarations of complaint. I mentioned someof these toward the end of chapter 3, including an article by ElizabethFox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese and another by Stedman Jones,both published in 1976. But such voices spoke in the name of socialhistory, rather than wanting to supplant it. For the Genoveses, thisseemed to imply a cantankerously reductionist form of class-analyticalMarxism based on interest (“who rides whom?”), in a deliberate

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provocation anticipating the future appearance of the short-lived U.S.journal Marxist Perspectives.2 From his side, Stedman Jones urged socialhistorians to have the full courage of their convictions, becoming the-orists in their own right rather than relying on the concepts and cate-gories of sociologists. They needed to escape from that dependencyinto a higher and more con‹dent plane of consciousness.3 At the endof the seventies, an extreme version of these injunctions appeared, anangry jeremiad against what its author called a “progressive dementia”in the discipline. “Now is truly a bad time to be a social historian,”Tony Judt’s article concluded counterintuitively, belying the buoyantmomentum of the time. After a scattershot denunciation actuallyaimed against North American social historians of France, Judt calledon “that minority of social historians who remain committed to theproper pursuit of history” to restore “the centrality of politics.” Onlyby “re-emphasizing, on every occasion, the primacy of politics,” heinsisted, could a “history of society” really be pursued.4

But these were all pleas for the betterment of social history, not itsrejection. On coming to the University of Michigan in fall 1979, Ijoined a department certainly moving in that direction. The MichiganHistory Department’s commitment to comparative social sciencecontended at most with a kind of good-natured skepticism, ratherthan recalcitrance or any outright hostility. The leading journal Com-parative Studies in Society and History had been edited from the depart-ment since 1962, ‹rst by the medievalist Sylvia Thrupp (1903–97)and then by the nineteenth-century Europeanist Raymond Grew(born 1930). The Michigan department took for granted intellectualconversation across the more usual geographical and subdisciplinaryboundaries. It valued non-Western histories extremely highly, a com-mitment practiced in the curriculum under the rubric of “compara-tive” and strongly encouraged by the university’s support for areastudies. Michigan’s reputation in the social sciences, centered aroundthe Institute for Social Research, also played a part. The main hub forsocial historians was the Center for Research on Social Organizationsin the Sociology Department, where Charles Tilly (born 1929) heldsway. Inside the History Department per se, particularly for graduatestudents and younger faculty interested in social history, Louise Tilly(born 1930) was the main ‹gure. As a departmental milieu, social his-tory crystallized around the Tillys’ Sunday evening salon, where foodwas brought and papers were read. But the History Department at

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large fully re›ected the prevailing disciplinary climate: in a playful pollof departmental preferences, Marc Bloch emerged as the late twenti-eth century’s most in›uential historian.

At the same time, a sense of dif‹culty and fermentation—thegrowing awareness of the sheer range of new ideas waiting to be dealtwith—was de‹nitely building. At the turn of the eighties, by far themost important source of disturbance was feminism, as opposed toquestions of race/racism, postcolonialism/postcoloniality, historiesof sexuality, and the other proliferating multiculturalist and identitar-ian standpoints presenting themselves later on. But Foucault’s ideaswere slowly beginning to circulate, as were discussions of psychoana-lytic theory, cautious borrowings from literary criticism, the slowsubterfuge of Hayden White’s Metahistory (published in 1973), andin›uences from cultural anthropology beyond the early essays of Clif-ford Geertz.5 For those of us with a British connection, RaymondWilliams remained central, as did the broader discourse of culturalstudies gradually attaining stronger institutional shape. Stuart Hall’sessays were acquiring greater resonance, while the distinctively“Gramscian” thrust of these British discussions was approaching itspeak. In all of these British contexts, the tenor was still avowedlyMarxist. In a further dimension, 1978 was also the year of EdwardSaid’s Orientalism.6

In retrospect, we can see a new set of af‹nities coalescing. Soonafter I came to Ann Arbor, Mick Taussig, then in the MichiganAnthropology Department, suggested we form an anthropology-his-tory reading group from a few younger faculty and graduate students,which duly met on a regular basis during the next couple of years.7

Faculty participants included my fellow German historian MichaelGeyer, who left for the University of Chicago in 1986; Keith Hart, aBritish anthropologist specializing on West Africa, then visiting in theMichigan department; the U.S. urban historian Terry McDonald,who, like myself, had just arrived; and the Cuban historian RebeccaScott, likewise freshly appointed in the History Department and theMichigan Society of Fellows. The graduate students includedFriedrich Lenger, then a German Fulbright visitor and master’s stu-dent in history, now teaching at the University of Giessen; the mod-ern French historian Tessie Liu, now teaching at Northwestern; andthe Romanian historian Irina Livezeanu, now teaching at Pittsburgh.We took turns in presenting from our own interests and research, but

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I mainly remember the exploratory touching down on a wide varietyof unfamiliar grounds. For a while, a local chapter of MARHO, theMid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization af‹liated with the Radi-cal History Review, also ›ourished in Ann Arbor, with its main axisamong younger faculty and graduate students in American Cultureand history. Again, the main interest was theory across the disciplines.

The most powerful sign of change I remember from soon after Iarrived in the United States was an event improvised by Charles andLouise Tilly to coincide with the ‹rst North American Labor HistoryConference, which occurred in October 1979 at Detroit’s WayneState University. The conference drew a number of younger socialhistorians, mainly in their thirties, from elsewhere in the country, andthe Tillys took advantage of their presence to stage a one-day confer-ence in Ann Arbor, to take stock of where things were in social his-tory. Besides a sizable contingent of graduate students and facultyfrom Michigan itself, the incomers included James Cronin, a historianof twentieth-century Britain; David Levine, a scholar of the social anddemographic history of industrialization; Edward Shorter, whosefocus was the history of the family; and three leading French historiansof the younger-to-middle generation—John Merriman, Joan Scott,and William Sewell. To help discussion, the Tillys proposed anadvance reading of the recent articles (mentioned earlier) by the Gen-oveses, Stedman Jones, and Judt, plus an article in which LawrenceStone surveyed the relationship between history and the social sci-ences.8 As the theme, they chose “Whence and Whither Social His-tory?”

The day was organized into three sessions: “Has Social HistoryGone Awry?” “What Choices Face Us?” and “What Should We Do?”Short (one-page) position papers were invited. The Tillys’ call to theconference foregrounded the degree to which existing practices ofsocial history were now being vigorously questioned.

Complaints about the crassness, arrogance and naiveté of thosesocial historians who draw heavily from the social sciences haveerupted in history since the econometricians burst upon the his-torical scene. But recent criticism contains some new elements:a desire to substitute cultural analyses and anthropological per-spectives for the harder-edged sociological work which becamepopular in the 1960s; increased questioning of the epistemolog-


ical bases and implicit political orientations of social history,especially as it is practiced in North America and particularly asit is in›uenced by the social sciences; a tendency of historianswho had previously pushed for a rigorous, autonomous brand ofsocial history to develop doubts about the feasibility or desirabil-ity of that program.9

What struck me instantly at the time was a silence on the obviouscommon denominator of the three precirculated critiques—theirMarxism. My own one-page paper saw the rise of “a more self-con‹dent and self-conscious Marxism” as the real source of the cur-rent divisions. While the call to the conference implied the apostacyor desertion of those who’d previously wanted a “rigorous,autonomous brand of social history,” it seemed to me that Marxist cri-tiques were themselves calling “for greater rigor, a more self-con‹dent independence, and a more consistent theory—i.e., formore rather than less autonomy.” So far from “cultural analyses andanthropological perspectives” now being freshly imported, moreover,such approaches had long been constitutive for the kind of social his-tory enabled by Edward Thompson and other British Marxist histori-ans but not encompassed in the Tillys’ social science paradigm. In fact,I doubted whether recent polemics amounted to a general crisis at all.Rather, they described “a ‹eld of internal disagreement” among socialhistorians, directed not against social history per se but toward com-peting visions of its future. Marxists wanted social history to followthrough on its “totalizing potential” and actually deliver on the ideal ofa “history of society.” That was the meaning of the call for a return topolitics.10

Of course, measured by similar discussions a decade later, muchelse was missing from this conference. Despite the presence of LouiseTilly, Joan Scott, and others, for instance, feminism and women’s his-tory were notably absent from the event’s formal architecture. Racewas entirely missing as a category, as were studies of colonialism andempire and the histories of non-Western societies—although, likequestions of women’s history, these arrived intermittently in discus-sions on the day. But most striking of all was the antinomy constructedby the event’s organizers between anthropology and other kinds ofcultural analysis, on the one hand, and the true ground of social his-tory, on the other. The Tillys implied, in no uncertain terms, that

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turning to culture would be a serious loss, even a betrayal, after all thehard work of social science credentialing during the past two decades.They maintained that a social history based on the methods, theories,and procedures of the social sciences was “rigorous,” whereas a socialhistory based on cultural analysis was not; the latter could only be soft,loose, insubstantial, more elusive, and simply not as serious in its cre-dentials and claims.

For me, the occasion of this conference was fascinating. It was my‹rst encounter with an important network of North American socialhistorians in collective action. It soon became clear that much of theenergy came from understandable irritation against Tony Judt’s per-sonalized polemics. But as the discussion unfolded, there was muchcareful and exploratory self-positioning. Talk recurred to theinsuf‹ciencies of “vulgar Marxism,” which seemed to be shorthand forquantitative studies of everyday social relations and material life in allthe familiar social historian’s ways. To make good the shortfall ofunderstanding, speaker after speaker agreed, a “more sophisticatedkind of cultural history” was now needed. The anthropologists pres-ent—notably, Mick Taussig and the South Asianist Bernard Cohn(then visiting from Chicago)—offered their own provocative counter-point. There was also much reference to European theory and to theBritish battles among Althusserians and Thompsonians. Initiallyknown across the Atlantic via the debates surrounding Richard John-son’s critique of Thompson and Genovese in History Workshop Journal,these battles were ratcheted forward by Thompson’s intemperateanti-Althusserian tract The Poverty of Theory.11

As it happened, those British theory debates were about to reachone particularly unpleasant and chastening climax. At the thirteenthHistory Workshop in Oxford, on 1 December 1979, Thompsondemolished Johnson in the Saturday evening plenary, shocking evenhis intellectual allies with the angry theatrics of the attack. ThatOxford occasion showed many things, but one was certainly the lim-ited usefulness of the sharp binary between “structuralism” and “cul-turalism,” which Johnson applied to history’s possibilities. NeitherThompson and his allies nor their opponents had foreseen the in‹nitecreativity and greater epistemological radicalism of the coming cul-tural histories of the 1980s, which eventually broke from the still-shared materialist problematic altogether. So-called culturalists andstructuralists had each retained materialist bearings that the new cul-


tural historians would largely disavow. Johnson himself originallydeclared, “Neither structuralism nor culturalism will do.” The logic ofa way forward pointed somewhere beyond each. In Britain, thechanged political climate produced by Thatcherism and the rebootingof the Cold War during the early 1980s rapidly relativized those bit-terly fought theoreticist battles.12

From the Tillys’ conference in Ann Arbor, I took an enduringimpression of uncertainty and ›ux. I’d seen an apparently rather cohe-sive group of social historians, formed around a set of generationalfriendships and solidarities (both political and intellectual), who werepreviously convinced of their choices but were now far less sure.While British Marxism and Marxist feminism were called on for partof a possible solution, moreover, this hope was more the vicariousimprint of a partially digested and still emerging antireductionist cri-tique, whose further unfolding across the Atlantic would eventuallydissolve the given Marxist problematic altogether. While the confer-ence discussions had generally embraced a spirit of openness and gen-erosity, the closing session was blighted by Charles Tilly’s angry inter-vention directed against various statements in William Sewell’s initialpresentation, which had referred to their personal disagreements overthe desirability of a turn to anthropology. Measured by the goodhumor of the rest of the day, the effect was shocking. The room wasstunned. Interrupting and overriding Sewell’s efforts at reply, Tillywielded all the personal authority of a presiding intellectual patriarch.He reasserted, in no uncertain terms, the primacy of “the harder-edged sociological work” that the conference had clearly been calledto defend. “Show me the alternative,” he kept demanding. Big thingswere obviously at stake.13

Taking the Turn

Looking back, I ‹nd the Tillys’ conference a prescient occasion.Within the year, Sewell’s Work and Revolution in France had been pub-lished; Joan Scott had moved from Chapel Hill to Brown, where shebegan a sustained encounter with poststructuralist thought; andCharles Tilly continued to hold the line. Simply to speak these threenames is to register the dimensions of the change. Attached to Tillyduring the 1960s (Scott formally so, under the terms of a Social Sci-

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ence Research Council training fellowship), Scott and Sewell wereprobably the leading progeny of the union of history and sociologyamong European historians. Yet here they were, declaring the newsocial history to be no longer enough. The discourse of social histori-ans was beginning to disobey, outgrowing its disciplinary containers,spilling across the boundaries its practitioners had thought secure. In apublished statement for the Tilly symposium, Francis Couvares said(in language still innocent of the coming times): “The new harlots ofcultural anthropology, ‘thick description,’ and semiotics threatendaily to shift the focus, to alter the terms of the discourse.”14

Yet the published trace of “Whence and Whither Social History?”conveyed virtually nothing of the immediacy of the intellectual break-ing point. Charles Tilly noted the challenge of “anthropological work,. . . the study of mentalités, and . . . more rigorous Marxist analyses,”but he then proceeded on the assumption that the existing project—namely, “collective biography, quanti‹cation, social-scienti‹capproaches, and rigorous studies of everyday behavior”—could go onmuch as before. The trick was simply connecting it to “the establishedhistorical agenda” in language historians could understand. As far as itwent, Tilly’s description of social history’s “two callings” was unex-ceptionable: “asking how the world we live in came into being, andhow its coming into being affected the everyday lives of ordinary peo-ple; asking what could have happened to everyday experience at majorhistorical choice points, and then inquiring how and why the out-comes won out over other possibilities.”15 But so long as the culturalconstruction of those processes was ignored and such categories as“everyday experience” and “ordinary people” weren’t put into ques-tion, the formulation would continue not to satisfy. Likewise, LouiseTilly’s problematizing of “work” and “politics” was all to the good: sheaverred that “to talk about changes in women’s work over time, morerigorous de‹nitions, words, categories are needed”; she further main-tained that politics must also be reconceptualized, “so we can talkabout the politics of those without formal rights.”16 But that concep-tualizing, it was clear, would happen only on the old materialistground. In that sense, the book Louise Tilly published jointly withJoan Scott in 1978 (Women, Work, and Family) and Scott’s later Genderand the Politics of History were separated by far more than a matter ofyears.17

This story of the Tillys’ Ann Arbor conference stands in for a much


larger and more rami‹ed set of intellectual histories, with many localvariations. It suggested the fracturing of the generational consensusthat sustained social history’s popularity during the previous decadeand a half. The confrontationalism of the resulting debates threatenedto divide the profession just as angrily as the earlier struggles for socialhistory had done before. Sometimes, these con›icts were over theoryper se, as in the acrimonious attacks on “structuralist Marxism”referred to earlier, which dominated left-wing intellectual life inBritain in the later 1970s. In the next decade, Foucauldian approachesand other poststructuralisms elicited comparable fear and loathing inthe United States. Within wider ‹elds of cross-disciplinary innova-tion, the turning to forms of cultural history was also related to thechanging climate of political life. The associated dynamic of genera-tional re›exivity pushed left-wing scholars of my broad generationinto bringing their intellectual and political life choices under review.As bene‹ciaries of the great expansion of higher education, trainedduring the 1960s and 1970s, we were also the last cohort to make itmore easily into secure positions before the academic job marketdried up. By the 1980s, the resulting career paths were bringing ustenured access to institutional in›uence. Increasingly, we were train-ing graduate students, managing research projects, organizing confer-ences, and editing journals.

The salience of this particular generational voice, its tones, and itspreoccupations was magni‹ed by the relative paucity of its successors.The later 1970s and early 1980s saw both a contracting job market anda depletion of the numbers of history graduate students, so that theresulting cohorts of doctoral graduates were less able to build a dis-tinctive generational presence. The divisiveness of the public skir-mishing between older social historians and the new cultural histori-ans during the later 1980s heavily overshadowed the intellectualchoices available to younger people entering the profession. Only themost courageous and idiosyncratic—or the most conservative andnarrow—easily avoided enlistment into the rival camps. This con-trasts yet again, in my view, with the later cohorts qualifying after theearly 1990s, who were already publishing their books and enteringtenured positions by the turn of the new century. By virtue of therevival of an extremely forthright politics of knowledge in the U.S.universities, in an atmosphere infused by the consequences of the so-called linguistic turn, these historians would have a great deal to say

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about gender history and cultural studies in the course of claimingtheir own distinctive voice.

It’s hard to plot with any precision the movement out of social his-tory into cultural history. As I’ve argued, the ‹rst wave of stocktakingessays usually tied to a “crisis” in social history—by the Genoveses,Stedman Jones, and Judt—still spoke from familiar materialistground. They were notably innocent of the poststructuralist and alliedtheories already driving innovation a few years later. The same inno-cence applied to other programmatic statements, including the found-ing editorials of such new journals as History Workshop Journal and SocialHistory (both launched in 1976) or the compendium of U.S. historicalwriting edited by Michael Kammen for the American Historical Asso-ciation in 1980, The Past before Us, whose essays were commissioned in1977–78 in the same climate of the midseventies. All of these exam-ples were borne by the momentum of social history’s expansion ratherthan re›ecting the coming uncertainties. A systematic survey of moreestablished journals—such as Past and Present, the Journal of Interdisci-plinary History, and the Journal of Social History, plus general journalswith social history content, such as the Journal of Modern History orAmerican Historical Review—reveals a similar absence of the literary orlinguistic theoretical in›uences soon to characterize the cultural turn.Whereas the latter two journals started noticing the new in›uencesthrough review essays and discussion forums by the end of the eight-ies, the older social history journals kept their distance well into thenext decade, as did another journal in the vanguard of the earlierexchange between history and social science, Comparative Studies inSociety and History.

The shift can be tracked through the newer journals, such as HistoryWorkshop Journal, Social History, and Radical History Review. We mightjuxtapose History Workshop Journal’s very ‹rst editorials, “Feminist His-tory” and “Sociology and History” (1 [spring 1976], 4–8), togetherwith the slightly later “British Economic History and the Question ofWork” (3 [spring 1977], 1–4), against the editorial “Language andHistory” published several years later (10 [autumn 1980], 1–5). If theearlier statements were ‹rmly continuous with the critical materialistdepartures of the 1960s (evidently connected with the in›uences ofThompson, Hobsbawm, and the other Marxist historians), the 1980editorial marked some distance from that founding materialism. His-tory Workshop Journal then renamed itself Journal of Socialist and Feminist


Historians, simultaneously publishing the guide “Foucault for Histori-ans,” by Jeffrey Weeks (14 [autumn 1982], 1, 106–19). This was fol-lowed by the editorial “Culture and Gender” (15 [spring 1983], 1–3).The new feminist literary criticism arrived in review essays by MaryPoovey and Joan Scott (22 [autumn 1986], 185–92). We can note thegradual entry of psychoanalysis via essays by Sally Alexander (17[spring 1984], 125–49) and Laura Mulvey and T. G. Ashplant (23[spring 1987], 1–19, 165–73), further con‹rmed by the full-blownspecial feature “Psychoanalysis and History,” which showcased fourarticles (26 [autumn 1988], 105–52), and by the follow-up responseby Jacqueline Rose (28 [autumn 1989], 148–54).18 Another specialfeature, “Language and History,” included an extremely severe articleby Peter Schöttler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis” (27 [spring1989], 1–65). The same year’s bicentenary issue on the French Revo-lution then took an almost entirely “culturalist” tack, in what wasbecoming the prevailing literary-cum-linguistic sense (28 [autumn1989], 1–87).19

In the world of historians, this was the much vaunted “linguisticturn”—a general discursive shift in the rhetoric and practice of theprofession from “social” to “cultural” modes of analysis. In the courseof the 1980s, social history became one site of a more general episte-mological uncertainty characterizing broad areas of academic-intellec-tual life in the humanities and social sciences of the late twentieth cen-tury. That ›ux affected some disciplines more radically than others. Itbecame more central more quickly in literary studies and anthropol-ogy, for example, than in the “harder” social sciences, such as sociol-ogy. It was also no accident that the furthest-reaching discussionsoccurred in the new and nominally “un-disciplined” areas of women’sstudies and cultural studies. Exactly why such a pointed and powerfulconvergence of new thinking should have occurred across ‹elds anddisciplines at this particular time will require much more careful studyacross many more types of contexts than I have room for here.

In particular, I want to avoid any suggestion that the new depar-tures occurred entirely within thought or that changes for historianswere somehow caused by debates within theory or by the impact of aset of philosophical interventions. As with any history of intellectualtransition, the ideas concerned will need to be tracked through manyparticular debates and biographies, numerous individual projects andinstitutional sites, and all the relevant chains of in›uence for collabo-

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rators and disciples. Intellectual changes also intersect in complexways with the policy worlds of governmentality and education, withthe public spheres of politics and the media, and with nonacademictypes of engaged intellectuality. When a fuller or larger history comesto be written, all these aspects will have to be addressed.

Nonetheless, the process included a speci‹cally theoretical dimen-sion, through which certain bodies of thought offered historiansresources and strategies they hadn’t possessed before. Through thetransition I’m describing, certain conditions of possibility becameopened or enabled. Certain new languages were proffered. As Iargued toward the end of chapter 3, by the end of the seventies, socialhistory was encountering frustrations and insuf‹ciencies for which ithad no self-generated solution. This was the impasse from which thecultural turn promised escape. It did so not least by furnishing thetools for self-re›exive examination of the history of social historyitself. By focusing on the disciplinary pedigree, it alerted social histo-rians to the forms of their own critical practice. In that sense, the cul-tural turn offered a way “out” precisely because it opened a way “in.”From my own, rather speci‹c vantage point as a modern Europeanistof British extraction living in the United States, that was how I expe-rienced the changes.

First and foremost, the cultural turn enabled a theoretical under-standing of gender whose effects transformed the ground of thinkingabout history. Whether as a dimension of analysis or as an area ofempirical work, women’s history had been absent from Hobsbawm’sbenchmark 1971 survey, and simply to reread such older accounts isto experience just how crucial the change has been. This was still truein 1979: none of the four symptomatic essays ›agged by the Tillys asthe reading for their conference (by the Genoveses, Stedman Jones,Judt, and Stone) grasped the transformative signi‹cance of the newwomen’s history, if they acknowledged its existence at all. Only in thelater 1970s did a substantial body of monographic work in this areabegin to appear. Even then, quite aside from the politics of surmount-ing the discriminatory practices and prejudices of the profession’sgiven disciplinary regime, much of that new work proved relativelyeasy to sideline, either because of its conceptual framework of “sepa-rate spheres” or because it subsumed the history of women within thehistory of the family.20 The theoretical move to gender analysisreduced this self-neutralizing effect. Only with the conceptual shift


from the history of women to the history of gender did the protectedcentral precincts of the discipline start to give way. Aside from theresulting histories of sexuality and sexual representations as such, thehistories of work, of class formation, of citizenship and the publicsphere, and of popular culture were all being reshaped by the close ofthe eighties.21

Second, by the end of the 1980s, the in›uence of Michel Foucaulthad become unavoidable. The speed of the reception shouldn’t beoverstated. His books were available very quickly, but Foucault’s ideasremained entirely absent from the earliest pioneering works on thesocial history of crime, the law, and imprisonment, published in the1970s. At that time, the English-language reception was conductedaround the margins of academic life—in such journals as Telos and Par-tisan Review in the United States and by a self-conscious avant-garde ofpost–New Left journals (such as Economy and Society, Radical Philosophy,Ideology and Consciousness, and m/f ) in Britain.22 Only by the early1980s were historians explicitly taking note. After that time, work onprisons, hospitals, asylums and other places of con‹nement, social pol-icy and public health, and all forms of governmentality became shotthrough with Foucauldian arguments about power, knowledge, and“regimes of truth.” Looking back at this entire burgeoning ‹eld ofsocial and cultural histories during the seventies and eighties, we cansee Foucault’s ideas less as the direct instigator than as a classic illus-tration of his own arguments about the shifts in discursive formations.By the 1990s, for example, early pioneers of the social history of crimewere taking a strong cultural turn, with superb results—from PeterLinebaugh’s The London Hanged, through V. A. C. Gatrell’s The Hang-ing Tree, to Richard Evans’ gargantuan Rituals of Retribution.23 At a levelof intentions, Foucault may have been inessential to these authors’ newdirections—for instance, an excellent sampling of German researchedited by Evans revealed little of Foucault’s explicit presence.24 Buttheir works couldn’t be imagined without him.

Furthermore, Foucault’s reception vitally redirected thinkingabout power, away from conventional, institutionally centered con-ceptions of government and the state and from the allied sociologicalconceptions of class domination, toward a dispersed and decenteredunderstanding of power and its “microphysics.” It sensitized historiansto the subtle and complex forms of the interrelationship betweenpower and knowledge, particularly in its forms of disciplinary and

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administrative organization. It delivered the exceptionally fruitfulconcept of discourse as a way of theorizing the internal rules and reg-ularities of particular ‹elds of knowledge (their “regimes of truth”)and the more general structures of ideas and assumptions that delimitwhat can and can’t be thought and said in speci‹c contexts of time andplace. It radically challenged the historian’s conventional assumptionsabout individual and collective agency and their bases of interest andrationality, forcing us instead to explore how subjectivities are pro-duced within and through languages of identi‹cation that lie beyondthe volition of individuals in the classical Enlightenment sense.

Not least, Foucault encouraged a rethinking of what historiansunderstood by “the archive.” He sought to break history out of itsdesire for the exclusive speci‹city of the origin and the sequential lin-earity of progressive time, aiming to reconstitute, instead, the forgot-ten places where new ways of understanding the world came to beimagined. His “genealogical investigations” helped historians reviewtheir given attitudes toward evidence and the empirical. Against thegrand explanatory designs of the birth of the modern world, he soughtto foreground the disparaged and overlooked; against the wish for arevealed continuity, he stressed interruption and dispersion, “the acci-dents, the minute deviations . . . the errors, the false appraisals andfaulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to existand have value for us.”25 In Foucault’s distinctive usage, genealogiesretrieved the marginal, the disadvantaged, and the lowly from the sup-pressed and occluded “ahistorical” corners where conventional histori-ans tended to banish them, demanding a different kind of archive forthe story to be told. This could show that

things “weren’t as necessary as all that”; it wasn’t as a matter ofcourse that mad people came to be regarded as mentally ill; itwasn’t self-evident that the only thing to be done with a criminalwas to lock him up; it wasn’t self-evident that the causes of ill-ness were to be sought through the individual examination ofbodies.26

None of this redirection came easily. For some years after Fou-cault’s writings entered currency, scarcely a meeting of historianspassed without dismissive jokes or irritated complaints about his“unhistorical” procedures. But for those bridling against the dry anddisembodied work of so much conventional historiography, an


extended encounter with Foucault’s writings resuscitated thearchive’s epistemological life. Far from supplanting or discarding anolder empirical approach, discursive analysis became its complemen-tary and coexistent partner. By engaging the archive as a “materialevent,” Foucault offered a kind of “radical empiricism.” Rather thanapproaching the archive merely through critique, he exposed its prin-ciples of construction. In so doing, he revealed the space of communi-cation between the thought and the time of culture, or betweenknowledge and the weight of history. He found the “root” groundwhere the empirical might come to representation, the enabling struc-tures that allowed the category of the empirical (and its authority) tospeak itself. Put another way, if we understand Foucault’s critique ofepistemology as essentially an interrogation of its conditions of possi-bility, those conditions themselves become a form of materiality. Byrestating the archive as a question, Foucault challenged historians tothink about the very ground from which history could be written.

A third aspect of the cultural turn concerned the fate of one of themain existing approaches to cultural analysis among social historians,that of the Annales tradition in France. For much of the 1970s, the his-tory of mentalités functioned as a panacea for many social historians.It seemed a compelling alternative to the canonical, high-cultural, andformalistic-exegetical kinds of intellectual history; it promised accessto popular cultures of the past; it provided ground for the applicationof quantitative methods and of approaches from anthropology; and itwas animated by the enticing vision of a “total history.” For a while,the translation and reception of the major Annales works, orchestratedby a few well-placed admirers, was virtually uncritical: “social historyseemed to turn around the Past and Present-Annales axis.”27 Then theclimate seemed to change. The tone of the symposium inauguratingthe avowedly Braudelian new journal Review, in 1978, was still largelycelebratory, but by the mid-1980s, a series of prominent andextremely searching critiques had appeared.28

Together with the unwillingness of the Annalistes themselves to the-orize their understanding of culture, those critiques successfullyexposed the reductionisms and unspeci‹ed determinisms at the coreof the work of Braudel and Ladurie. Critiques by Dominick LaCapraand Roger Chartier also recuperated the ground that intellectual his-tory seemed to have ceded earlier to the history of mentalités. Neitherof those developments ultimately compromised the achievements of

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Bloch and Febvre or precluded the potential ongoing production ofcultural history in the classical Annales mode, suitably rethought in thelight of contemporary ideas. But on the whole, historians’ discussionsof culture moved elsewhere, either outside the main early modernlocations of Annales-in›uenced work or onto the ground of languagewhere the running was being made by feminist theorists and intellec-tual historians, either untouched by the Annales paradigm or directlycritical of it. Now, the more interesting readings of early modern cul-ture were tending to come not just from social historians inspireddirectly by Annales, who’d set the pace in the 1960s and 1970s, butfrom literary critics interested in Mikhail Bakhtin.29

Fourth, another body of cultural analysis, that of contemporary cul-tural studies, exerted extraordinary in›uence, without yet having pro-duced very much speci‹cally historical work. A still emergent cross-disciplinary formation during the 1980s, cultural studies comprised amiscellany of eclectic in›uences—sociology, literary scholarship, andsocial history (but not, interestingly, anthropology) in Britain; com-munications, ‹lm studies, literary theory, and re›exive anthropologyin the United States, where strong institutional support would alsocome from women’s studies, American Culture, African-Americanstudies, and ethnic studies programs more generally. The U.S.momentum came from the humanities, without much convergencewith the concurrently proliferating interdisciplinary initiatives insocial science. In Britain, in contrast, where the prevalence of qualita-tive sociologies blurred the severity of the divide between social sci-ence and the humanities, developments ran in the opposite direction.On both sides of the Atlantic, feminist theory was to record decisivein›uence, as would the gathering post-Saidian critique of colonial andracialized patterns of thought inside the Western cultural tradition. Bythe early 1990s, the two national discussions had de‹nitely converged.

The range of topics pioneered in cultural studies reads like aninventory of the new areas gradually opened up by historians in thewake of their own “cultural turn.” Cultures and economies of con-sumption and entertainment, whether approached in mass or luxuryterms, became one of the ‹rst of these, generating elaborate projectsfrom the eighteenth century to the present. For both funding and crit-ical purchase, this interest fed patently off the processes of capitalistrestructuring driven so relentlessly forward during the 1980s, as didserious work on the visual technologies of ‹lm, photography, video,


and television, extending into commercial media (such as advertising,comic books, and magazines).30 Feminist scholars explored the rela-tionship of women to popular reading genres (including romances,family sagas, and gothic novels), to television soap operas and sitcoms,and to popular cinema through ‹lm noir, melodrama, science ‹ction,and horror.

Before the 1990s, any presence of historians within this emergentuniverse of cultural studies was extremely thin: among the forty-fourcontributors to the benchmark volume Cultural Studies (the publishedrecord of a spectacular international gathering of the ‹eld at Urbana-Champaign in April 1990) were only four historians, none of whomtaught in a history department.31 But the territories being chartedwere eventually occupied by great numbers of historians. In additionto the topics already mentioned, thematics pioneered in cultural stud-ies increasingly dominated history’s disciplinary landscape by the endof the nineties. Examples include the use of autobiography and thepersonal voice, postcolonial cultural critiques, the reopening ofdebates around high versus low culture, explorations of popular mem-ory, and the study of representations of the national past. Whereasmost concrete research initially focused on the era since 1945 (the“long present” of cultural studies), interest soon transferred to earliertimes.

Fifth, with the cultural turn came an acceleration of the dialoguebetween history and anthropology. Versions of this accelerated dia-logue could already be encountered at the height of the social historywave in the 1970s, notably in the ubiquitous citations of CliffordGeertz’s advocacy of “thick description” or in Edward Thompson’sre›ections on “anthropology and the discipline of historical con-text.”32 The conversation appeared in the pages of Past and Present dur-ing the early 1960s and went back earlier still to such isolated works asHobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels. In certain historiographical contexts—notably, the pioneering scholarship on colonialism and decolonizationin South Asia, Africa, and Latin America—the closeness of historicaland anthropological work had always been clear. But during the1980s, a big fracturing that occurred in anthropology’s main under-standings of “culture” changed, from a historian’s point of view, thevalency of the ethnographic epistemology associated with Geertz. As aresult, the mere “opening of difference to sympathetic cross-culturalunderstanding” became called radically into question as a suf‹cient

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description of the anthropologist’s charge.33 Again, this story variedfrom country to country. In the United States, anthropology’s disci-plinary coherence became disordered by an explosion of new thinkingabout agency and action. There, the discipline’s boundaries wereblown completely open by the impact of poststructuralism, feministtheory, literary theory, and Foucault.34

For historians already engaged in rethinking their approach to cul-ture, the resulting debates had big implications. Anthropology’sinscription into colonial and broader imperialist relationships duringthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries had made it part of themachinery of values and belief that helped structure Western forms ofmodern subjectivity. It not only became a source of colonial knowl-edge in the more obvious technical ways but also rendered the non-Western world “knowable” in the more basic sense, by delivering thetheories, categories, and constructs that shaped the metropolitanWest’s own self-understandings. The same process translated thepractices, beliefs, and social relations of indigenous peoples intoterms of comparison.

In these connections, accordingly, the new anthropologies of colo-nialism both revivi‹ed the historiography of European colonial domi-nation and invited a less encumbered study of the colonized peoplesthemselves. Such work deauthorized the canonical standing of earliertheorists of the ethnographic encounter. Most important of all, thenew critiques turned the “colonizing gaze” back in on itself, makingthe metropolitan world’s constructions of the colonial Other intothemselves an object of study. As Edward Said’s insights becameworked through, anthropologists and historians began to examine thepedigrees of their own disciplines. In the spirit of Said’s “contrapuntal”analytic, the history of empire became revealed not as the stage wherethose disciplines had performed themselves but as the condition fortheir possibility in the ‹rst place. As Franz Fanon had put it, “Europeis literally the creation of the third world.”35

The ethnographer’s standpoint has been radically deconstructed.The most in›uential early intervention was undoubtedly the sustainedanalysis of anthropological texts in the 1986 collection Writing Culture,by James Clifford and George Marcus; after it, the innocence of theethnographer’s procedure could never be quite the same again.36 Ageneration of studies proceeded to explore the ways in which ethno-graphies “make use of various tropes, literary conventions, and narra-


tive devices to establish ethnographic authority and/or certain kindsof unstated visions of the world.” Whereas ‹eldwork had alwayssought to show how “ ‘native’ categories are culturally and historicallyconstructed,” the privileged standpoint of anthropology itself had sur-vived, because the ethnographer’s own categories had never been sub-ject to the same close scrutiny.37 However, once the objectivity of theethnographer’s gaze was brought under exhaustive critique (within anew paradigm of situatedness and self-re›exivity), the previouslyaccepted protocols of ‹eldwork started to come apart.

Each of these developments—the problematizing of ‹eldwork, thecritique of the ethnographic encounter, and the self-questioning of theanthropologist’s place in the colonial relationship—have produced aturning back into the anthropologist’s own society. Encouraged by thebreaking down of disciplinary boundaries, anthropologists began theserious investigation of the contemporary United States. Similarly,kinship, family, religion, and ritual were toppled from their naturaldominance of the cultural anthropologist’s research agenda, which onthe contrary became radically opened up. That agenda could nowinclude everything from the forms of legitimacy of the Latin Americanstate, representations of history in Andean popular culture, and thecontemporary dynamics of genocidal violence in Rwanda and SriLanka, to the patterns of transnational migration in the post-Fordisteconomy, the scandals of televangelism of the late 1980s, and theexperience of a New Jersey high school graduating class between the1960s and the present.38

Two Disruptions

Two further aspects to the cultural turn of the 1980s don’t ‹t cleanlyinto any integrated narrative of unfolding individual and collectivechange but certainly had a vital presence—sometimes as a productiveincitement, but more often as an uncomfortable supplement, a kind ofcontinuous second-guessing. One of these involved questions of“race”; the other concerned the related problems of colonialism andpostcolonialism. Of course, historians, especially those on the left,were painfully aware of these issues long before the arrival of the cul-tural turn. Indeed, certain ‹elds were centrally concerned with them,most obviously in large parts of U.S. history, in studies of slavery and

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emancipation, or in the history of colonized societies. But before thegenerality of social historians could begin properly seeing the impor-tance of “race” (above all, for the study of Europe’s metropolitan soci-eties), some sustained political encounter would be needed, a jolt or ashock, much as the earlier acceptance of “gender” had required a sim-ilar political process of recognition.

Taking such concerns into one’s default grasp of the shape of thesocial world and how it works, rather than treating them as discreteand demarcated subjects of interest to specialists, was something new.For social historians of classic materialist bent, class had always sup-plied the main lens for studying the behavior and attitudes of particu-lar social groups, whatever the precise de‹nitions of class position andclass belonging preferred. Where racism was most palpably present inthe practices and outlook of a particular working class, as in theUnited States, social historians struggled with ‹nding some basis fordistinguishing “class” from “race” in the explanatory framework beingused; for the answer, they invariably cleaved to the “harder” or “moreobjective” rootedness of class in the actually existing social relations ofproperty and workplace. Lacking any comparable objective basis inbiology or scienti‹cally founded differences, “race” could then be pre-sented as “entirely socially and historically constructed as an ideologyin a way that class is not.” The varying forms racist ideology took—including its material existence and instituted practices, all the ways inwhich it became a basis for action as an “ideological” category—couldthen be tackled using the familiar social historian’s methods.39

As Barbara Fields pointed out in one of the best statements of thisview, approaching race as an ideological construct certainly didn’timply that it was “illusory or unreal.”40 Fields explained: “Nothinghanded down from the past could keep race alive if we did not con-stantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to ‹t our own terrain. If race liveson today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-cre-ate it in our social life.”41 But despite this acknowledgment of ideol-ogy’s social materiality, such approaches tended to treat racial ideol-ogy as mainly a mask for interests located elsewhere, as a languagedevised to secure and reproduce a superordinate structure of interestsand authority, whose vocabulary directly re›ected the society’sunequal distribution of wealth and power. Even while speci‹callyemphasizing the “realness” of racial ideology, therefore, theseapproaches implicitly referred it to the underlying sovereignty of


social explanation. They invariably related “race,” in some ultimatelydetermining sense, to the more decisive structural facts of propertyownership, job competition, access to social and cultural goods, dis-tribution of community power, and so forth.

David Roediger observed of this syndrome, “The point that race iscreated wholly ideologically and historically, while class is not whollyso created, has often been boiled down to the notion that class (or ‘theeconomic’) is more real, more fundamental, more basic, or moreimportant than race, both in political terms and in terms of historicalanalysis.”42 This was especially a problem for historians working inU.S. labor history. But much more generally, unpalatable ideologies,such as racism or xenophobia, tended to be externalized or otherwiserelativized from treatments of working-class formation during the1960s and 1970s, much as Tim Mason’s work had stressed the limitedsuccess of Nazism in breaking down the defensive resilience of theGerman workers’ class-conscious culture. No matter how rich andsophisticated its detailed analyses or empirical instantiations, “base andsuperstructure” materialism ultimately tended to sell the complexitiesof ideological analysis short. Even the most sophisticated such analysestended to reduce “race” to one kind of “ideological device” or another,emphasizing its origins and functions in some larger system ofmysti‹cation where it serviced a dominant structure of “political, eco-nomic, and social power.”43

Seeking to understand racism’s ef‹cacy culturally by getting insidethe appeals of racial thought—trying to grasp how “race” worked as alived identity or as a credible source of meaning, as a persuasive strat-egy for bringing imaginative order to the material world—challengedthese existing practices of social history. Gradually during the 1980s,though, some historians began exploring racial thinking in its ownterms like this. They approached it as a type of subjectivity requiringmore than a readily legible relationship to bene‹ts and privileges or acalculus of interest in order to achieve its purchase. Fully cognizant ofboth the power-related aspects of racist practices and the violenceassociated with maintaining racialized systems of inequality andexploitation, such an approach argued for cultural analyses of racialdistinction as well. In this view, racism subsisted on combinations ofexplicit, partially articulated, and unconscious assumptions andbeliefs, while engendering more insidious forms of collusion and com-plicity than violent coercion could deliver alone. This was the dif‹cult

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step in question: being able to see racialized forms of understanding ascomparable in importance, cognitively and ontologically, to a per-son’s social provenance and class location in helping shape her/hissense of belonging in the world. As well as being a system of coercivepower and violent inequality, in other words, “race” also needed to beunderstood as a discursive formation.

By the early 1990s, this context produced Roediger’s Wages ofWhiteness.44 This book, clearly incited by the transatlantic version ofthe new rightward political conjuncture (it was written “in reaction tothe appalling extent to which white male workers voted for Reagan-ism in the 1980s”), bespoke a loss of materialist con‹dence in thesuf‹ciencies of social history similar to the one I’ve been describing.45

It certainly presented a bleak view of the alleged opportunities forcross-racial labor solidarity in the nineteenth-century United States,although, by this time, a rich and nuanced historiography on the sub-ject hardly made this very controversial. More damagingly, it queriedefforts to salvage nineteenth-century labor republicanism as the dis-tinctive U.S. form of a generic process of working-class formation:though the democratic élan of this working-class political culture mayhave been impressive, its racist and exclusionary features had been tooeasily effaced, as was the absence of black workers from the story pro-vided.46 Still more searchingly, Roediger raised the question of thepsychic compensations workers derived from acquiring a “white”racial identity under the simultaneous impress of becoming proletari-anized: “[T]he pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ forwhite workers. That is, status and privileges conferred by race couldbe used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships,North and South.”47 New languages of racialized class identi‹cation,postures of assertive masculinity, the ambivalent pleasures of suchpopular entertainments as blackface and minstrelsy—all theseinscribed whiteness with a set of powerful meanings whose particularvirulence came from negative de‹nitions of slave or free blacks.48 Inthis way, Roediger argued, “race studies” became a necessary tool ofself-analysis for dominant North American subjectivities.

With the Wages of Whiteness, we are back once more to the socialhistorian’s old dif‹culties with culture, ideology, and consciousness.Roediger and historians of his bent started to argue that the social his-torian’s existing repertoire dealt poorly with the insidiousness ofracial thinking in the forming of working-class subjectivities. Drawing


modestly on psychoanalytic theory and a “socio-ideological” approachto language based on Williams and Bakhtin, Roediger shifted focusdecisively to the “cultural,” paying creative attention to such sourcesas folklore, popular humor, street language, song, and popular enter-tainment. Most important of all, he forthrightly returned to the studyof ideology as such, offering a novel perspective on how to analyzedominant ideological forms. Under this perspective, “whiteness” wasan invitation to participate in the bene‹ts of a dominant culture whoseprinciples of access were all the more ef‹cacious for being unstated. Ina public culture so relentlessly focused around race and its languagesof distinction, the primary term of privilege, authority, and generalpotency went unnamed and unmarked: “race” belonged to the non-white minorities; the normal condition of being American was“white.” If the nation was “a structure of power that circumscribes andshapes the identities to which individuals and groups can aspire,”whiteness became crucial not only to social goods and psychic well-being but also to political faculties of citizenship and belonging.49

How did this impinge on the awareness of a modern European his-torian? However widely one reads or discusses, there’s a differencebetween noticing important departures in other ‹elds and movingfrom such abstract and detached encounters into one’s own work—especially in this case, when the other context in question was theUnited States, whose histories and legacies of slavery, Jim Crow,migration, and immigration seemed so self-evidently different. Thetemporality of this particular intellectual history was also “off,” post-dating the other developments I’m describing by about a decade:Roediger’s impact came at the start of the 1990s, when the culturalturn was already in full swing. So how were Europeanists thinkingabout these questions? Why didn’t “race” join “gender” earlier duringthe 1980s on the leading conceptual edge of the cultural turn?

In fact, since the late sixties, the confrontational dialectic of racistand antiracist actions had been violently troubling public life in Britain(and elsewhere in Europe). Escalating anxieties about immigration,dramatized in Enoch Powell’s notorious “rivers of blood” speech inApril 1968, brought issues of race into the centerground of politicalawareness; indeed, a mass demonstration against Powell at theOxford Town Hall in 1968 provided my own initiation into direct-action politics.50 During the seventies, questions of race and immigra-tion formed one main crucible for the right-wing radicalization that

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culminated in the Conservative election victory of 1979 and the rise ofThatcherism. What interests me in retrospect, though, is the intact-ness of the separation between the disturbing presence of these politi-cal developments and my own historical interests. Actually, the twowere bleeding into each other fairly continuously, but bringing thisfact to consciousness took a much longer time.

One important marker was the 1978 publication of Policing the Cri-sis, by Stuart Hall and a collective of authors from the BirminghamCenter for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).51 During the sev-enties, the CCCS housed an intensive exchange between British tradi-tions of cultural criticism and social history, on the one hand, andEuropean grand theory, on the other. In effect, Williams and Thomp-son were encountering Althusser, Gramsci, and Foucault.52 Takingoff from the moral panic in August 1972 surrounding an instance of“racial mugging” in Handsworth, an important Birmingham center ofblack British population, Policing the Crisis showed how the issue of“law and order” had recast the agenda of British politics to become thecenterpiece of an emergent racialized imaginary for the New Right. Inan argument, reaching back over two centuries, about the British stateand its legitimacy, the state was seen to be losing its capacity for orga-nizing popular-democratic consent, leading to a political crisis inwhich racialized anxieties eased the passage to a more coercive andauthoritarian period. But whereas racism was clearly a central term ofthe crisis this book diagnosed, “race” still ‹gured mainly as a signi‹erfor other things. Though the “race text” ran right through the center ofthe analysis, it receded, in a way, into the broader argument about thestate, hegemony, and class.

The publication four years later of The Empire Strikes Back: Race andRacism in 70s Britain, by another CCCS collective, angrily protestedthis earlier effacement of race.53 Paul Gilroy and his coauthors insistedthat recognizing the pervasiveness of racial ideology had to becomecentral to the analysis of contemporary British politics, becausenotions of British identity (and notions of the “Englishness” at theirheart), were structured around powerful assertions of racial differ-ence. These fed partly on the imperial past, partly on the postimperialsocial antagonisms of Britain’s decline. Contemporary national iden-tity was centered around an unmarked and unspoken whiteness, whilemarginalizing the presence of Afro-Caribbean, South Asian, and otherminority populations. Indeed, the silencing of one population was an


entailment of the primacy of the other. For all its crucial oppositionalimportance, furthermore, even the radical reworking of British tradi-tions in the thought of Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, andthe New Left had reinscribed the same latent ethnocentrism. Bybringing these assumptions into the open, The Empire Strikes Backsought to force the “Britishness” or “Englishness” of cultural studiesinto self-consciousness and voice.

In some obvious ways, this approach presaged the coming U.S. cri-tiques of whiteness. It also re›ected the incipient movement awayfrom older habits of class-centered analysis, toward a recognition thatconsciousness, identity, and subjectivity are formed in other ways,too. As Gilroy wrote elsewhere, this analysis “challenge[d] theoriesthat assert the primacy of structural contradictions, economic classes,and crises in determining political consciousness and collectiveaction.”54 The argument drew its urgency from the political times: ifmore self-conscious subcultural identities were beginning to coalescearound British blackness during the seventies, these were more thanmatched by a mainstream Conservative drive for the recentering ofnational identity around an aggressively exclusive vision of English-ness, for which race held the key.55 During the 1980s, the continuingeruption of racialized con›icts into public life slowly unsettled schol-arly approaches to British history and allowed the earlier histories ofracial attitudes to be brought into prominent focus.

Over the longer term, this shift encouraged a new appreciation ofthe empire’s constitutive importance in delivering the operative basesof social and cultural cohesion for modern metropolitan Britain, par-ticularly via its impact on popular culture and the dominant sociopo-litical values. But for present purposes, the most striking thing aboutthis new registering of the empire’s centrality was the degree to whichcard-carrying historians themselves were not involved. The role ofCCCS—a deliberately transdisciplinary organization, whose innova-tive historical work was conducted precisely away from the surveil-lance of a history department—has just been cited. But more gener-ally, the challenge came from the margins even of culturalstudies—for example, in the critiques of an emergent black artsmovement and its interest in “diaspora aesthetics” or from outsideBritain altogether, in literary studies in the United States.56 In thisperiod, a benchmark volume on de‹nitions of Englishness, producedby historians, left imperialism out entirely.57

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Of course, there was no shortage of monographic research eitherexploring the political, military, and economic histories of theempire’s creation or assessing the importance of colonies for the homecountry in those same respects. In the 1970s, social historians alsoturned in large numbers to the local histories of the colonialencounter, where they examined the establishment of British rule inparticular places. As long as culture continued to be regarded as“superstructure” or was set aside for the specialized attention ofanthropologists, it was easily bracketed from these accounts. But onceculture became rethought as residing in practices as well as ideas (inBenita Parry’s words, “as itself a material practice producing repre-sentations and languages that embody active forms of power and isconstitutive of a social order”),58 no work had more impact in helpingthat awareness along than Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s work

assert[ed] the indispensable role of culture as the vital, enablingcounterpoint to institutional practices, demonstrating how theaggrandisement of territory through military force and thebureaucratic exercise of power in the colonies was sustained bythe ideological invasion of cultural space, while at home the factof empire was registered not only in political debate and eco-nomic and foreign policy, but entered the social fabric, intellec-tual discourse, and the life of the imagination.59

Concurrently with the new work on race, therefore, histories ofcolonialism also began registering an extremely far-reaching transfor-mation. Awareness of the issues made swiftest headway in literarycriticism, cultural studies, anthropology, geography, and historical‹elds with an existing anthropological presence (as in South Asia). ButEuropean historians also came gradually to see the point—namely,the degree to which the social relations, cultural practices, andaxiomatically racialized discourse of national superiority that weregenerated overseas in the subordinated extra-European world becamepowerfully reinserted into European metropolitan frames.

“Colonial knowledge”—forms of colonial representation throughliterature, photography, museums and exhibitions, mass entertain-ment, commercial advertising, and all areas of popular culture—became an especially fruitful ‹eld of inquiry. The gendering ofnational identity, whether through militarism and warfare or in themore general ordering of nationalist representations around images of


masculinity and femininity, was also explored in its colonialist dimen-sions—as, for example, in the anxieties surrounding colonial inter-marriage and all manner of affective attachments in colonial settings,including the management of sexuality, child-raising arrangements,and the forming of friendships. These areas of intimate life were intri-cately related to matters of colonial governance and affairs of state.They accumulated huge bodies of discourse around gender inequali-ties, sexual privilege, class priorities, and racial superiority, which, inturn, became subtly rearticulated into nationalist talk at home.60

If the complex back and forth between Europe and its “Others” hasbeen constitutive for the possible understanding of political identitiessince the late eighteenth century, as Said and other critics of Enlight-enment traditions claimed, such unequal reciprocities have also beenreplicated inside European societies themselves—between metropol-itan and peripheral cultures, between town and country, betweenhigh and low cultures, between dominant and subordinate nationali-ties and religions, between West and East. This has been clearest, per-haps, in the perceptions and consequences of the nation form. Anawareness of nationalism’s negative codings, of the ways in whicheven the nation’s most generous and inclusively democratic imagin-ings entailed processes of protective and exclusionary centeringagainst others (often extraordinarily subtle, but also including themost violent versions of direct colonial rule), has been one of the mostimportant gains of the last two decades. In colonizing the world, met-ropolitan nations also created hegemonies of possible meanings. Eventhe most radical and self-conscious of oppositional, anticolonial, orminority movements have necessarily mounted their emancipatorydemands from a ground of identity that colonialism’s power hadalready laid down.

One of the most important bodies of historical work engaging thesequestions developed around the Subaltern Studies project, initiated atthe end of the 1970s by a group of younger South Asian historiansfrom India, Australia, and Britain, who were inspired by the moresenior Ranajit Guha (born 1922), a Marxist historian of rural societyin colonial Bengal who was teaching at the University of Sussex. In theseries Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society,including eleven volumes from its beginning in 1982 to the time ofthis writing, this group sought to intervene in Indian historiography onthree distinct fronts, in each case contesting the in›uence of a power-

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ful adversary in the politics of knowledge. They opposed, ‹rst, thecelebratory historiography of the nationalists, who subsumed popularpolitics in the progressivist master narrative of the creation of theIndian nation-state; second, the “Cambridge school” of British SouthAsianists, who preferred an interest-based interpretation of Indianpolitics emphasizing elite factionism rather than mass-based mobiliza-tion; and ‹nally, the class-based economic determinism of an IndianMarxist tradition.61

The project took its name self-consciously from Antonio Gramsci,who used the term subaltern for subordinate social groups lacking orga-nized political autonomy. Growing from Guha’s earlier CommunistParty background and an impressively early discussion of Gramsci’sideas in Indian Marxist circles (going back to the late 1950s), this alsosuggested af‹nities with the work of Thompson, Hobsbawm, and otherBritish Marxist historians drawn to Gramsci.62 As such, the project hadall the same resonances of the “history from below” familiar from theBritish social history wave already in progress. It signi‹ed a valuing of“the politics of the people” that established historiographies had vari-ously suppressed. Guha’s original preface declared that the study of thesubaltern, connoting the “general attribute of subordination in SouthAsian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,gender, and of‹ce or in any other way,” could allow the forms of pop-ular resistance to be recovered and reassessed. Gramsci’s category ofthe “organic intellectual” was also important for the self-understanding(and affective pleasure) of these politically engaged historians.

I encountered Subaltern Studies personally early on, when I noticedthe ‹rst volume in an Oxford catalog and ordered it blind, partlybecause of the Gramscian intimations, partly because of an interest informs of peasant political action. Unsurprisingly, given the discipline’sprevailing demarcations, I’d been unaware of Ranajit Guha’s presenceat Sussex; the university’s chosen interdisciplinary organization byregions of the world made it unlikely that the paths of a graduate stu-dent in European history and a South Asian historian on the facultywould ever cross. Later in the 1970s, I spent much time dabbling inthe historiography of peasant movements in various parts of theworld, and by the early eighties, I claimed a passing familiarity withthe work of several of the Subaltern Studies authors, yet I had no realinkling about the focus and intent of this new initiative. Similarly, Iknew enough Indian historiography from my Cambridge years


(1975–79) to recognize a new body of oppositional work when I sawit, yet I had little sense of how this added up.

Things fell into place much later, when a powerful jolt in the pub-lic intellectual climate of the U.S. universities in the later 1980sbrought “Western” and “non-Western” historiographies into directconversation in quite new ways—sometimes smoothly, sometimesjaggedly, always with great and lasting intensity. The complexities ofthat encounter far exceed the bounds of what I can deal with here. Theimpetus came partly from the contemporary politics of multicultural-ism and race, partly from all the sociocultural and political falloutfrom the transnationalized restructuring of the world capitalist econ-omy we now call globalization, and partly from the autonomouscourse of interdisciplinary discussions inside the academy itself. Oncecertain kinds of academic debate got under way, powerfully driven bythe pedagogies of multicultural exchange and coexistence (for whichthe universities acquired such overwhelming responsibility in theUnited States), the in›uence of Edward Said and other theorists of the“postcolonial,” such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born 1942) andHomi Bhabha (born 1949), soon kicked in.

By the early 1990s, “postcolonialism” had begun de‹ning the centerground for scholars working in cultural studies, providing those inter-ested in connecting Third World and metropolitan histories with achallenging new frame. But once again, historians—especially histori-ans of Europe—became only haltingly involved. Some may have beenreading the relevant theory during the intervening years, but anytransference into concrete and discernible research projects, in waysthat changed how European history could be written and taught, tookmuch longer to occur. Moreover, for theorists, too, this process wasmore protracted. For those living in Europe, the main ground of pri-ority during the 1980s—theoretically and politically—remained anolder sense of European priority. For instance, Stuart Hall had beenwriting about questions of race brilliantly and consistently since the1970s, but as one term of a wider theoretical repertoire and often inparallel to his main concerns, which included successive episodes of“wrestling” with theory, the critique of Thatcherism, and the engage-ment for “New Times.”63 “Race” acquired primary salience onlytoward the end of the 1980s as the wider political priorities shifted andthe discourse of postcolonialism coalesced.64

During the initial stages of the cultural turn, in the ‹rst half of the

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1980s, awareness of “race” and colonialism crystallized for Europeanhistorians somewhere beyond their main immediate scholarly preoc-cupations. The active processing of Said’s ideas proceeded at ‹rstalmost exclusively among literary scholars and, to some extent,anthropologists.65 But sometime between the later 1980s and theearly 1990s, a conjunction was made. Literatures that had previouslystayed apart began to speak to each other, across disciplinary andinternational boundaries.66 Clearly, there were particular local andinstitutional contexts for how that happened.67 By 1992–93, a spate ofmajor works—still rarely authored by historians in the formal disci-plinary sense—signaled the arrival of colonialism on the Europeanist’shistoriographical map. These works included Paul Gilroy’s retheoriz-ing of modernity via the histories of black migration, in The BlackAtlantic; Mary Louise Pratt’s study of travel writing and the aestheticsof transculturation, in Imperial Eyes; a special issue of History WorkshopJournal entitled “Colonial and Post-Colonial History”; a pathbreakingvolume on Nationalisms and Sexualities; Michael Sprinker’s criticalanthology on the work of Edward Said; and Said’s own new work,Culture and Imperialism.68 At this point, discussions concerned with theextra-European colonial worlds looped back to reshape understand-ings inside Europe in very powerful ways.69

Among the authors of those imported extra-European historiogra-phies, the Subalternists were an especially coherent and in›uentialgrouping. Increasingly noticed outside the immediate South Asian‹eld by the early nineties, their approach was also being worked intoa program for frankly oppositional popular histories elsewhere, mostnotably in Latin American studies.70 Really striking in retrospect,though, is the degree to which Subaltern Studies negotiated, withinits own trajectory, all the aspects of the transition from social historyto cultural history experienced by historians of Europe in these sameyears. Under Guha’s inspiration, the group had begun with a primarycommitment to histories “from below,” aiming to recuperate the sup-pressed importance of the Indian masses for the history of anticolonialstruggles. While strongly grounded in the Marxist tradition, thisambition likewise patently paralleled the heterodox features of post-Thompsonian social history in Britain, developing an equally creativeanalysis of the forms and limits of domination in the Indian country-side and seeking to restore a strong and coherent sense of agency tothe behavior of the peasantry. Retrieving and elaborating the com-


plexities of the peasantry’s presence in the anticolonial movementwas the leitmotif for the group’s early work, as was a searchingreview of Marxism’s relationship to anticolonial sentiment or “criticalnationalism.”71

Like Edward Thompson, for instance, the Subalternists focused onthe rami‹ed ambiguities, as well as the straightforward oppressions, inthe relations of domination and resistance in the countryside, insisting,with Gramsci, that “subaltern groups are always subject to the activityof ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up.” Their writing alsodisplayed the same pull toward culture, focusing not only on “the his-tory, politics, economics, and sociology of subalternity” but also on“the attitudes, ideologies, and belief systems—in short, the cultureinforming that condition.”72 To reassemble the submerged coordinatesof peasant agency, Guha and his colleagues proved exceptionally cre-ative at reading colonial archives “against the grain,” broadening thesocial historian’s usual repertoire toward literary criticism, Sanskritphilology, linguistics, folklore, and structural anthropology. Guha’sown pioneering works evoked something of the “patrician society/ple-beian culture” framework that Thompson’s eighteenth-century essayshad been exploring around the same time.73 It postulated

two domains of politics in Indian modernity, the elite-domainbased on European/bourgeois grammar of constitutionalism andorganized public life, and a relatively autonomous domain ofsubaltern politics, both coming together in the workings ofIndian democracy but operating on distinctly different under-standings of power and rule.74

But by the time the group was being noticed seriously in Britain andNorth America (in response to the ‹fth Subaltern Studies volume,published in 1987), its complexion was already shifting. Early aware-ness of Foucault quickened easily toward theories of colonial govern-mentality and the critique of post-Enlightenment systems of knowl-edge, with inevitable damage to the earlier belief in an authenticpeasant consciousness. Such doubts in the subaltern’s resistiveautonomies, together with the associated loss of con‹dence in histori-cal materialism, exactly paralleled the uncertainties building upamong British and North American social historians during the sameperiod. Openings toward literary criticism, oral history, and anthro-pology emphasized the distance from the starting points even more.

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Most searchingly of all, a poststructuralist critique published by Gaya-tri Spivak in 1988 under the title “Can the Subaltern Speak?” took thegroup to task for their highly gendered presuppositions, rejected thecentered model of the sovereign subject their project seemed toimply, and, on that basis, questioned the very possibility of retrievingsubaltern political agency in the ‹rst place.75 As the group clari‹ed itsthinking in response—engaging seriously with gender, broadening itsown ranks, and taking a pronounced “textualist” direction, whiledevoting more attention to the speci‹cities of India’s differences fromthe West—divisions began to open. Just as Subaltern Studies emergedinto the international limelight during the early nineties, some voicesbegan accusing the group of forgetting the politics entailed in the ear-lier materialist mission.76

In a double sense, however, these later trajectories can be foundinscribed at the start. The culturalism embraced in the 1990s was nei-ther the postmaterialist betrayal alleged by its detractors nor its mir-ror image, the upward progression toward ever greater sophisticationor superior antireductionist recognition. On the one hand, the vitaldepartures driving the cultural turn were quite visible in the earliestSubaltern Studies volumes, from the striking synergies of Gramsci andFoucault, through the favoring of microhistories, to the insistence onIndian speci‹cities and a very acute sense of just how dif‹cult recover-ing popular agency would be. While encompassing real diversities ofapproach, the early essays already struggled with the perspectivaldilemmas now so familiar from current debates. Guha’s re›ections onthe relation between ideas of history and the forms of domination,drawing on distinctions between mythical and historical time, antici-pated later concerns with indigenous idioms of thought, just as hisessay “Chandra’s Death” marked out the methodology of the frag-ment.77 Rather than advancing from a lower to a higher level ofinquiry—as a simple progressivist model of the transition from the“social” to the “cultural” might suggest—such moves were built intothe founding intervention. Thus, the later discussions required less thedisavowing of a social history origin than the clarifying of an alwaysdetectable ambivalence.

On the other hand, this South Asian historiography both presagedand paralleled the course of the “linguistic turn” in the West. The newculturalist preferences of Subaltern Studies in the nineties were not acorruption resulting from access to the luxuries of postcolonial theo-


rizing in the privileged academies of the United States, as some of theangrier opponents implied. The new culturalism wasn’t somethingthat had to be “learned” in the West in that sense at all; its incitementswere constitutive from the beginning. Moreover, while, for theirpart, Europeanists certainly learned a very great deal from the Subal-ternists as they entered wider circulation, they also had their ownpoints of earlier connection, which, however, were harder to see bythe nineties. Like the embittered salvos ‹red against Subaltern Stud-ies, the ‹eld of ‹re in the West between “new cultural historians” andself-styled Thompsonians was obscuring certain lines of descent. Yet,whether in South Asia or the West, social historians during the 1980shad been responding with theoretical and moral urgency to a set ofcommon problems—those concerning the relationship between socialpasts and political futures, between material life and cultural mean-ings, between the structural ordering of the experienced world andthe accessible forms of subjectivity, between history and politics. Inthis sense, for a Europeanist of my generation, much of what the Sub-alternists offered linked back through the debates of the 1980s and1970s—through Foucault, feminism, and Gramsci—to the thinkingof Raymond Williams.

This is what I meant by claiming earlier that postcolonial histori-ographies “looped back” to the earlier moments of radical innovationwhere this book began. On the one hand, as Said acknowledged, Ray-mond Williams had surprisingly little to say on the subjects of colo-nialism and empire as such.78 Though a traverser of borderlands, hewas otherwise the most rooted and ethnocentered of thinkers; and ifdeterminedly internationalist in his European theoretical range, hewasn’t notably inspired by the late twentieth-century ›orescence ofpostcolonial literatures, already so exuberantly under way when hedied.79 On the other hand, his later writings about modernism, withtheir intense back-and-forth between the novel uprootedness of met-ropolitan consciousness and the older and more parochial modes ofnational or regional belonging, echoed powerfully in the efforts ofcontemporary postcolonial thinkers to struggle through the contradic-tions of an intelligible cosmopolitanism, on one side, and an affectivecultural nationalism, on the other.80 So many of the concerns nowconsidered coterminous with postcolonial thought—ideas of subjectpositionality; of the locatedness of identity; of the lived particularitiesof place, region, and the body; of the in-betweenness of actually exist-

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ing community; and, indeed, of the complex relationship of all thosethings to the more universal formations of class—were subtly pre-empted in Williams’s writings, particularly in the incomparable TheCountry and the City, but also in his ‹ction.81 Precisely the problematicrelationship between universalism and cultural alterity underscoresthe Subalternists’ most recent work.82

If we see the cultural turn as, in part, enabling a renewed consider-ation of broad theoretical and methodological purposes (as opposed tovalidating of any particular empirical and textual content), thein›uence of Williams was clearly apparent in the ‹rst wave of post-colonial analysis. Said recognized that “even one or two pages byWilliams on ‘the uses of Empire’ in The Long Revolution tell us moreabout nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of her-metic textual analysis.”83 Said invoked Culture and Society when, at theend of his introduction to Orientalism (that ‹rst ground-breaking inter-rogation of the Western intellectual tradition), he asserted the need towork toward “the process of what Raymond Williams has called the‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode.’ ”84 I’m certainly nottrying, here, to restore His Majesty’s metropolitan theory to a ricketyand tarnished old throne, as the preeminent theoretical model thatlater non-Western thought could only emulate. On the contrary, ifthe postcolonial critique of the West’s bad old binarisms means any-thing at all, it’s to catch the convergences and contingencies of cul-tural (and theoretical) genealogies and, indeed, to rescue these“impure” spaces as the very site where critical thought might occur.85

History in Public

I’m here trying to ›ag the degree to which debates among historiansduring the 1980s were shadowed by the wider politics of intellectualchange in the public sphere—ranging across the analogous con›icts inother academic disciplines; the commentaries of writers, journalists,and other public intellectuals; all the broader sociopolitical divisive-ness of what came to be known as the “culture wars”; and the increas-ingly transnational or “globalized” dimensions of all such exchange. Asa Europeanist, I did not exactly experience the urgency of con›ictsover “race” and the “postcolonial” as “noises off”; I was too acutelyaware of them for such a metaphor to work. But for most of the


decade, they unfolded somewhat removed from where I did most ofmy scholarly work.86 Even though my sense of being a historian wasalways formed by a politics, the grounds for that commitment wereshifting in vital ways behind my back. Some of the consequences tookme by surprise. Moreover, there were other ways in which academichistorians were losing control of their subject.

Thus, in wider public arenas, we are now constantly bombarded byall manner of references to history and appeals to the past. All formsof public “memory work,” remembrance, and commemoration—of‹cial, commercial, private—have acquired extraordinary momen-tum, accelerating during the 1980s into a veritable “boom in mem-ory.” The appeal to memory has become promiscuous, an unavoidablefeature of the landscape of ideas for anyone interested in grasping thedynamics of social change at the turn of the new century. For histori-ans themselves, moreover, “history and memory” has become an idée‹xe of the discipline. But that interest massively exceeds any profes-sionalized discourse, saturating large sectors of entertainment, popu-lar reading, commercial exchange, and many other parts of the publicculture. What is going on here?

In Fredric Jameson’s view, this intense interest in the past signi‹esa “nostalgia for the present.”87 It bespeaks an anxiety about the loss ofbearings and about the speed and extent of change, in response towhich the narration and visualizing of history seem to promise a sur-rogate architecture of continuity. Representations of the past—per-sonal and collective, private and public, commercial and uplifting—become both therapy and distraction, a source of familiarity andpredictability while the actual ground of the present turns unstable.Such nostalgia spells the desire for holding onto the familiar even as itdwindles from view, for ‹xing and retaining the lineaments of worldsin motion, of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that areunsettled.

But by the 1990s the memory boom was also marking the return of“the local” to a central space in contemporary political thinking. Thisderives in part from the post-1960s revival in Europe and NorthAmerica of a direct-action politics based on smaller-scale communitiesand grassroots solidarities. But it also bespeaks the “Think globally, actlocally” rhetorics of Green activism and opposition to globalization,which in turn re›ect the transnationalizing of contemporary historyand the challenge to sovereignties based on the nation-state. This is

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precisely the ground of the postcolonial historiography discussed inthis chapter’s preceding section, a historiography de‹ned by the com-plex struggles around place and ethnic particularism generated in thewake of empire in its decolonizing and newly revivi‹ed forms. In eachof these contexts, encouraged by the logic of Jameson’s “nostalgia forthe present,” memory work offers a way of resuturing individual sto-ries to collective narratives of belonging and accomplishment at a timewhen the old models for imagining a political future, especially thesocialist ones, no longer persuade. As contemporary disaffection fromthe conventional political process continues to worsen, such alterna-tive modes of public self-recognition expand their appeal. The possi-bility of mapping personal experiences onto a public landscape ofknown and common events by using the memorializing repertoire(autobiographies, oral histories, museums, monuments, anniver-saries, media celebrations, and national holidays) as the medium foralternative recuperative histories may allow a different ground ofmemory to be reclaimed.

Memory work as such has no speci‹c political valence. In this sense,Pierre Nora’s remarkably popular multivolume project Les lieux demémoire, on French national history, provides one of the mostgrandiose of recent illustrations. It can be read as wanting to shiftnational identity decisively away from its older obsessions with thenational state, in a spirit more in keeping with European integration,the postnational future, and the idea of a common European home.But Nora’s paradigm of the “sites of memory” markedly depoliticizesthe national question. For the highly centered national consensus ofthe old French Republican tradition, it substitutes a fragmented anddiscrete mélange of disparate topics, which nonetheless accomplishtheir own concentration of French national memory in a more insidi-ously ethnocentric manner. That more oblique recentering af‹rms anaggregated sense of common cultural identity, while excluding thoseparts of contemporary French society—Islamic, North African,migrant—who can’t ‹nd themselves in the national past’s assembledmosaic.88

There’s a potential left-wing stake in this new discourse of memoryand locatedness, for which the crisis of socialism in the post-1989political conjuncture blazed the path. By shocking the Left out of itsaccustomed thinking about political futures, the end of Communism


compelled a revisiting of earlier histories—not least in Eastern Europeitself, where the discourse of loss, dispossession, and displacementcould be mapped most directly, if most painfully, onto the retrievingof earlier lived (that is, remembered) experiences of actual dates,events, places, names, and forms of historical agency. Through thiscomplicated process of return, the concept of memory itself can beloosened from its earlier toxic connotations of right-wing “blood andsoil” philosophy, encouraging the Left to think more positively aboutthe nation in this ‹nely located way. Such possibilities also resonatewith postcolonial efforts at theorizing the emplacement of strugglesfor independence, social justice, and human rights in very particular-ized contexts of locality and ethnic recognition. Despite its growingidenti‹cation with migrancy, diaspora, and hybridity, postcolonialityis a condition only ever experienced through its localized modalities,even as its subjects ‹nd themselves being relocated to the multicul-tural social scenes of the metropolis. In these terms, a language of rec-ollection can become a language of recognition. The Left’s classicutopian telos of a placeless futurity becomes replaced—for good andill—by an image of the good society remembered in time andgrounded in place, mapped onto speci‹cities of history and experi-ence. “Memory” supplies the language of this move.

In these terms, “memory” offers a crucial site of identity formationunder our contemporary predicament, a way of deciding who we areand of positioning ourselves in time and place, given the hugeness ofthe structural changes now so destructively remaking the world—inthe new era of capitalist restructuring de‹ned by globalization, theend of Communism, and the “post-Fordist transition.” It became acommonplace of the 1990s to speak of the “postmodern condition,”while another claim placed us more tendentiously at the “end of his-tory.” Whatever the merits of these particular arguments, the mem-ory boom seems related in one way or another to this “cultural logic”of a contemporary transition.89 The new information technologies andelectronic mass media are also involved. Processes of commodi‹-cation and the commercialization of culture, in the consumereconomies of entertainment and stylistic display, produce a postmod-ern economy of signs in which the mobile arbitrariness of historicalimagery and citation becomes rampantly unavoidable. In that way,too, the contemporary sensibility becomes a memorializing one. We

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are constantly being invited to place ourselves in relation to one kindof “past” or another. The contemporary public sphere issues constantincitements to memory in that sense.90

An endless procession of anniversaries provides another part of thisstory. The national referents vary. The great extravaganza of 1989 inFrance, which sought to declare the French Revolution ‹nally “over,”was only the most dramatic of these culturally particular events. Themost spectacular cross-national commemorations involved theextended and rami‹ed remembering of World War II, beginning withthe fortieth anniversary of the European peace, in 1985, and continuingthrough the sequence of ‹ftieth anniversaries from the outbreak of warin 1939, D-day, and the liberation (six years later). That public calen-der spawned an extraordinary degree of commemorative excess, over-running the spaces of public representation and the television screens inparticular, while triggering a plethora of private recollections.91

Once again, the meaning of all this activity—of so much obsessionalpublic remembering—lies beyond the formal occasion and the imme-diate contents themselves. In Europe, surely, the sense of an ending—both internationally (with the end of the Cold War, the strengtheningof the European Union, and the transnational shrinkage of the globe)and domestically (with the de‹nitive dissolution of the postwar settle-ment and the recomposition of the social landscape of class)—sent usback to those earlier moments. In effect, we were returning home,revisiting the origins, reopening the history that produced the contem-porary world, even as the latter turned out to be lost. This is what sen-sitizes us so easily to the past as a ‹eld of meaning.

Developments within history as a specialized activity—as a disci-pline—further explain memory’s salience as a kind of thematics.Claiming the postwar era for teaching and scholarly research hasplayed its part, so that historians are now able to write about the yearswhen they were themselves biographically formed. Until veryrecently, 1945 acted as a boundary of the present in a limiting way.Oral history’s slow acceptance as a subdisciplinary area since the mid-1970s has made a difference—again with its own journals, profes-sional associations, conferences, institutional bases, individual clas-sics, agreed methods, technologies, and evolving traditions. Thepower of interdisciplinarity, with its early institutional bridgeheadsfrom the 1960s and more recent ›ourishing, likewise created homesfor sophisticated intellectual work on memory. Until historians’ sus-


picions toward anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and othertheoretical traditions became allayed, discussions wouldn’t escape thenarrowly drawn technical debates about the problems of using oralsources.

In this last respect, cultural studies certainly provided the mainframing and impetus for the growth of memory as an intellectual pri-ority. Treating memory as a complex construct shaped within and bythe public ‹eld of representations, which needs to be approached viaforms of interdisciplinary collaboration, owes everything to the ana-lytical languages developed in cultural studies during the past threedecades.92 Those languages have recast our perceptions of the past inthe present, pointing us to all the ways in which history becomesevoked and addressed. It alerts us to the wide range of sites and mediathrough which remembering (and forgetting) take place in a publicsphere, consciously and unconsciously, through ‹lm and television,photographs and advertisements, radio and song, theater, museumsand exhibits, tourist spots and theme parks, ‹ctions, ceremonials,school curricula, political speeches, and more. In this way, the widerdomain of ideas and assumptions about the past in a society has beenclaimed for historical study, so that the historian’s customaryground—that is, the boundaries of accepted historical analysis, thede‹nition of what counts as a legitimate source and an acceptable sub-ject—falls more and more into question.

The resulting possibilities are either extremely unsettling orextremely exciting, depending on the defensiveness of one’s discipli-nary standpoint. They confuse many of the older ways of de‹ning thehistorian’s distinctive practices and identity, freeing up the establisheddisciplinary constraints and opening the imagination to a far moremobile agenda with a much wider repertoire of legitimate approachesand methods. This produces an extremely fruitful indeterminacy. Itupsets the customary approach to the boundary between “memory”and “history,” where the one was once straightforwardly the profes-sional organizing and contextualizing of the other. History literally“disciplined” memory in that older approach. It shaped and educatedthe raw and unreliable rememberings of individuals as it called intoaction the superior languages of objectivity, facing their partial andsubjective accounts with the truth of the archive, the “reality” of thehistorical record, and the “facts.”

Precisely along that fault line, a certain de-professionalizing of his-

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torical knowledge has been at work. We’re now used to ‹nding his-torical thinking and historical research in places other than universityhistory departments—partly elsewhere in the academy, but partly inthe culture at large, in various amateur and lay pursuits. For RaphaelSamuel, one of the most eloquent chroniclers and theorists of theimplied process of rede‹nition, this shift made history into “an organicform of knowledge,” “drawing not only on real-life experience butalso memory and myth, fantasy and desire; not only the chronologicalpast of the documentary record but also the timeless one of ‘tradi-tion.’ ” Samuel explains:

History has always been a hybrid form of knowledge, syncretiz-ing past and present, memory and myth, the written record andthe spoken word. Its subject matter is promiscuous. . . . In pop-ular memory, if not in high scholarship, the great ›ood or thefreak storm may eclipse wars, battles and the rise and fall of gov-ernments. As a form of communication, history ‹nds expressionnot only in chronicle and commentary but also ballad and song,legends and proverbs, riddles and puzzles. Church liturgies havecarried one version of it—sacred history; civic ritual another. Apresent-day inventory would need to be equally alert to thememory work performed (albeit unintentionally) by the adver-tisers, and to the in›uence of tourism. . . . As a self-consciousart, history begins with the monuments and inscriptions, and asthe record of the built environment suggests, not the least of thein›uences changing historical consciousness today is the writingon the walls. The in›uence of video-games and science-‹ctionwould be no less pertinent in trying to explain why the idea ofchronological reversal, or time traveling, has become a normalway of engaging with the idea of the past.93

Some of the favorite subject matters of cultural studies—exhibi-tions and museums, cinema and photography, magazines and popular‹ctions—have been ideal for exploring the porousness of the bound-aries between academic history and the wider universe of knowledgesabout the past, described by Samuel. This is also where history’s rela-tionship to memory is being rethought. The relatively new journalHistory and Memory, the main standard-bearer for such work inside theprofession, displays exactly this range of in›uences. Film, both as avisual record of the past and as a form for the production of history in


its own right, is attracting widening attention. The critical and eclec-tic appropriation of psychoanalytic theory of various kinds has playeda key role, whose potentials historians have begun only slowly toexplore. Photography likewise affords rich opportunities, particularlyfor the social and cultural history of the family and personal life.Finally, in all of these areas, the impact of feminist theory and politicshas been simply enormous, clearing the path for new initiatives anddirectly inspiring many of the most creative departures. Feminism’schallenge has legitimized the study of subjectivity, eventually forcinghistorians to deal with such questions. The analytical uses of autobiog-raphy and various combinations of cultural theory, psychoanalysis,and history have been especially exciting.

Backing Away from the Social: History’s New Borderlands

Being a historian at the start of the twenty-‹rst century can mean awide variety of things. In all of the ways previously mentioned (andmany others besides), the boundaries have been coming down. As aresult, history’s borderlands are now far less defended against otherdisciplines or types of knowledge than they were forty or even twentyyears ago. The traf‹c is two-way: historians visit the other places ofunderstanding far less furtively than before and are also far morereceptive to intrusions from the outside, whether these spring fromother disciplines and ‹elds of knowledge or from everyday life, popu-lar culture, and parts of the public sphere. This double broadening ofhistory’s horizons, toward other parts of the academy and toward thewider social and cultural contexts of historical thinking discussed byRaphael Samuel, enables a new starting point for exploring the imagesof the past circulating through a society’s public and private worlds.

This novel multiplicity of possible histories and the porousness ofthe boundaries between the inside and the outside of the academic dis-cipline were a vital part of the crisis experienced by social historians.As the earlier part of this chapter argued, a new caution developingduring the 1980s in relation to social analysis and the history of societyled many to back away from the more grandiose ambitions of an ear-lier period and the con‹dent materialism sustaining them. Concur-rently, greater interest developed in questions of subjectivity and allaspects of personal life, for which feminism certainly supplied the

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most far-reaching and sustained inspiration. Both these developmentswere associated with what became commonly known as the “linguisticturn” or “cultural turn,” namely, the interconnected controversiesthat were exploding around the given theories, methods, and episte-mological standpoints of the human sciences by the turn of the 1990s.

Writing the intellectual history of that extraordinarily complexintellectual upheaval—in a manner commensurate with all its uneven-ness and diversity and with the broader cultural, social, and politicalforces partially explaining it—has so far eluded most commentators.It becomes ever clearer that the favored shorthand descriptions—”cultural turn,” “linguistic turn,” and “postmodernism”—were coinedin the heat of relatively short-lived, but extremely polarizing, initialbattles, disguise as much as they clarify, and con›ate manifold varia-tions. Announced in a 1989 volume of essays that blurred distinctionsin just that way (foregrounding certain approaches of lesser stayingpower while neglecting or ignoring others), “new cultural history”became another of these talismanic descriptions. It helped a disparatemiscellany of new approaches and subjects to be broached during the1990s, allowing a motley assortment of radicals, innovators, and out-liers to assemble under its banner. But in retrospect, it begged a greatmany questions as well.94

Turning to “culture” was the rather vague common denominatorfor heterogeneous discontents. By offering a label of convenience foran emergent skepticism about the study of “society,” it brought tovoice the gathering unease with an existing paradigm. It bespoke thegrowing appeal of smallness of setting, a moving away from big-scalestructural histories of whole societies. During the earlier social historywave, the desire for an integrated account of society as a whole, some-times voiced through a concept of “total history,” usually implied theeven larger comparative frameworks of development theory drawnfrom the social sciences. Such frameworks emphasized “big structures,large processes, and huge comparisons,” whose pursuit pervaded themetadiscourse of social science historians during that time.95 But bythe 1980s, country by country, some disillusionment with those ambi-tions was beginning to set in.

One example of this disillusionment was the interest in “microhis-tory,” a program proposed by Italian historians grouped around thejournal Quaderni Storici, who were inspired by anthropology more thansociology, by the idiosyncratic or deviant anomaly rather than the sta-


tistically predictable or representative norm, and by a more “conjec-tural” than “scienti‹c” method. Dissatis‹ed with social science historybecause it imposed the standard of the large scale and the longue duréeand insisted on the superiority of quantitative methodology, thisgroup sought to bring historical study down to the everyday life andlived experience of concrete individuals, as the best way of renderingthe same large questions intelligible.96

This Italian grouping was certainly not the only example of a devel-oping skepticism about the grand ambitions of social history in itsreigning sociological or Marxist forms. A similar movement wasunder way by the late 1970s in West Germany. It converged with theItalian departures and adopted some of the same language, while ›yingits own banner of Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life.97 InFrench history, Natalie Zemon Davis held a similar place since the late1960s, with a series of pioneering essays. With the publication of TheReturn of Martin Guerre in 1983, she made much wider waves in theprofession at large, a disturbance further reinforced, around the sametime, by Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes inFrench Cultural History.98 Across the English Channel, in Britain, socialhistorians had been less swept up in the ambitions of social science his-tory in its more robust and dogmatic guise. The ebullient critiquescoming from Edward Thompson and others provided strong counter-vailing inspiration in that regard.99

One of the biggest new departures subsumed beneath the slogan-eering of the “new cultural history” during the 1980s was feministadvocacy of gender history. Perhaps the single most in›uential—andnecessarily contentious—early prospectus for the new approaches ingeneral was Joan Scott’s 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category ofHistorical Analysis,” which became a benchmark text for any historianseeking to grasp what was at stake in the linguistic turn. A brilliantwork of lucid advocacy de‹ned by eclectic poststructuralist af‹lia-tions, Scott’s essay presented gender as the variable and contestedconstruction of sexual difference, which was also “a primary way ofsignifying relations of power.”100 As such, it demanded the attentionof historians at large rather than just those who happened to be work-ing on gender relations per se.

Using a “deconstructive” method borrowed from the writings ofthe philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida and a theory ofpower based on the ideas of Michel Foucault, Scott argued that the

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interrogation, breaking down, and opening out of accepted categoriesshould be one of the historian’s leading tasks. Doing this could makeclear the contingent or constructed history of seemingly natural or sta-ble terms of distinction, such as sex and gender, but also race, class,nation, and any other modern term of agency and belonging, includ-ing the very idea of the subject or the self. Moreover, in addition to itsmore purely methodological challenge to historians, this effort alwayscarried a highly charged political meaning. If such “naturalized” sys-tems of meaning could be shown to have been negotiated and con-tested in the past, they might become similarly vulnerable to ques-tioning for the present and the future.

Scott’s proposals proved hugely controversial, in ways that can’t begone into here.101 They formed one central item in the so-called cul-ture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s as those “wars” affected thediscipline of history. In that time, the bitterness dividing the adherentsof the opposing positions was angry and intense. For a while, the spacefor effective thinking about genuinely dif‹cult questions became gra-tuitously narrowed by the mutually exclusive epistemological choicesthat supporters and enemies of poststructuralism alike now sought toimpose. The ‹xing of discussion to theories of language and textualityseemed to present feminist historians of gender with a strict polarityof options between “cultural” and “social” approaches, so that the dis-putes reproduced much the kind of restrictive binary opposition thatScott herself had originally wanted to refuse. But beneath all the tur-moil of such positioning, a much greater diversity of work was alwaysbeing done.

While the partisans of the linguistic turn and the defenders of socialhistory were seeking to drum their respective allies into camps, a con-tingent of mainly younger historians were patiently exploring howboth approaches might be joined. Undertaking such a work of synthe-sis, even at the level of generous-spirited and experimental conversa-tion, was always a fraught thing to attempt. The pervasiveness of thedebates at the height of the ‹ghting in the early 1990s usually ruled outthe option of simply absenting oneself from the fray. Wrestling withthe issues required enormous energy and time—for the purposes ofreading, arguing, writing, and thinking. Between the overwroughtintensity of the polemics and the production of seriously groundedhistorical studies, either some time needed to elapse or other kinds ofdistance had to be present.102


But if troubling in their divisiveness, the polemical extremes alsopushed back the boundaries and clari‹ed the differences. If the spacefor publicly refusing the starkness of the choices took a while to openup, the practical coalescence of more hybrid possibilities has nowbecome much easier to see. Behind the surface tumult of the linguis-tic turn, historians in a variety of areas were creatively subjecting thebest of the older approaches to the exciting challenges of the new,across a wide variety of periods and themes—in labor history; inanalyses of the welfare state; in histories of medicine, the law, andother professions; in studies of schooling and pedagogy; in readings ofpopular culture; in work on sexuality; in histories of empire, colo-nialism, and race.

Moreover, this process of fermentation was not occurring exclu-sively inside the discipline, sealed off from the outside. For one thing,the dynamism and excitement were intimately linked to the spread ofan interdisciplinary consciousness, which can be charted institution-ally between the late 1980s and mid-1990s, leading, by the end of thenineties, to signi‹cant consolidation—through journals, conferences,debates, and key publications and eventually within particular univer-sities, by the launching of seminars, initiatives in curriculum, thefounding of institutes, the allocation of funding, and the creation ofnew departments and programs. In a number of major universities,including my own, the very texture of scholarly, pedagogical, andgeneral intellectual exchange became interdisciplinary through andthrough. For historians, accordingly, the bundle of theoreticalin›uences shaping such texts as Joan Scott’s 1986 article or circulatingmore broadly through the discipline was always generated elsewhere,either in other disciplines (such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, andliterary theory) or among typically “adisciplinary” thinkers, such asStuart Hall, Nancy Fraser, or Michel Foucault. Where innovativework is being produced, it’s hard to ‹nd historians who are not in con-versation with other disciplines by now, whether through collabora-tive research, in their teaching, in their conference attendance, orsimply in whom they read and cite.

This is where the relationship between academic history and therest of the world becomes particularly hard to disentangle. As the pre-ceding re›ections suggest, the sense of the past in a society embracesfar more than merely the activities of the scholarly discipline, just asacademics are themselves constantly interacting with a society’s wider

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images and ideas of the past, whether consciously or in less re›ectedways. As a ‹eld of meaning, history is always beset by these doubledunderstandings—on the one hand, of history as past time, as a distinctset of subject matters and all the ways historians seek to work onthem; on the other hand, of history as a sign in and for the present, acontainer of contemporary meanings, with all the complexities thatproduces in the representational arena, enabling the constant and dis-orderly back-and-forth between a deceptively ‹nished “then” and apatently active “now.”103 What makes the historian’s predicament sointeresting these days is precisely the intensity of the interactionbetween these two types of understanding. The relationship in itself isnothing new. But the willingness of historians to see it may be.

Ideas Change—but How?

Joan Scott’s essays of the mid-1980s were certainly a central item inthis repertoire. But a much wider range of debates were in play, vary-ing ‹eld by ‹eld and country by country. With respect to gender his-tory per se, the narrative I know best at ‹rsthand—from my perspec-tive as a Marxist historian educated in Britain, working on Germany,and migrating in 1979 to the United States—began in the mid-1970s,with Marxist-in›uenced analyses of women’s oppression under capi-talism, while moving rapidly to critiques of what the availableMarxisms were able to offer. To grasp the ways in which women livedtheir oppression, feminists then turned quickly to theories of ideologyand subjectivity, so that barely a few years had elapsed before psycho-analysis seemed to replace Marxism as the main point of orientation.In the resulting mix, literary theory and theories of language—shapedboth by readings of the French feminist theorists Julia Kristeva, LuceIrigaray, and Hélène Cixous and by the wider reception of Foucault,Derrida, and Jacques Lacan—converged with an emerging interest in‹lm, popular reading genres, and other aspects of popular cultureacross the burgeoning territories of cultural studies.104 But again, ifthe ensuing theory debates could often be divisive, the lasting out-comes for historians materialized behind these more visible and some-times grandstanding polemics, as the more focused and concrete his-torical projects gradually took shape. However constructive—and


indeed unavoidable—the debates over theory may have been, the ulti-mate payoff came in the actual histories they enabled.

Allowance also has to be made for serendipity. Certain textsexcited historians during the eighties, not because they were con-sciously adopted as an avant-garde, but because they worked sympto-matically by bringing together disparate needs and discontents, byanswering questions barely waiting to be posed, and by feedingnascent desires for change. Each individual text of that kind has a his-tory, of course. The conditions of possibility for its production—by aparticular author, in a particular institutional scene, with particularresources and supports, surrounded by all the determinate circum-stances (intellectually, socially, culturally, and politically) that histori-ans are used to exploring—can certainly be de‹ned. With suf‹cientperspective, using all the appropriate tools and strategies of contextu-alization, historians can bring these complicated intellectual patternsinto focus, endowing them with persuasive coherence. In retrospect,as the genealogy of any radical intellectual departure becomes con-vincingly historicized in that way, the interconnectedness of the rele-vant texts, ideas, and movements can then be established, and theirearlier pedigree can be identi‹ed. But for those who are living througha particular process of intellectual change at the time, the sheer unex-pectedness of the relevant in›uences can seem far more impressive.

The authors of the works I want to highlight here were onlyambiguously historians in the usual accredited sense. They came fromthe margins of the profession, were writing outside the normal con-ventions of monographic or similar scholarship, or were working ashistorians in other disciplines. Everyone will have their own preferredcandidates for such a list. My own choice necessarily re›ects the par-ticularities of my own standpoint and were among the most widelyread and discussed in the way I’m suggesting. They unlocked possibil-ities for new ways of thinking among historians. They took such think-ing outside the proverbial box.

I give ‹rst mention to a trio of works (in descending order of reso-nance) whose imaginative methodologies, radical epistemology, orig-inality of subject, and general quirkiness placed them self-consciouslyat odds with the prevailing conventions of social history in their ‹elds:Carlo Ginzburg’s study of the heretical cosmology of the sixteenth-century miller of Friuli, Menocchio, in The Cheese and the Worms;

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Jacques Rancière’s The Nights of Labor: The Worker’s Dream in Nine-teenth-Century France, which called into question the projections ofproletarian authenticity only recently constructed by social historiansaround the ‹gure of the radical artisan; and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’sextended re›ection on the cultural meanings of “the railway journey”for the nineteenth century’s transformed understandings of the newtechnological modernity of the industrializing world.105 The syn-chronicity of the in›uence of these works isn’t exact. Ginzburg’s bookwas published in Italy in 1976 and appeared fairly rapidly in translationfour years later; the 1981 French edition of Rancière’s work wasextensively discussed among English-speaking social historians aheadof its translated publication in 1989; The Railway Journey enjoyed analtogether more subterranean in›uence, appearing in Germany in1977 and New York two years later, but entering social historians’consciousness much more slowly.106 Yet each of these works chal-lenged social history’s presuppositions in a similar manner, encourag-ing a different vision of evidence, subject matters, and the writingstrategies historians could entertain.

These historians were all mavericks operating on the edges of theprofession, with a variety of eclectic and esoteric knowledges in theirtraining and background—from philology, art criticism, and literarytheory to drama, philosophy, and general cultural analysis. The nextworks I’ll cite reemphasize the same type of connections, with furtheradmixtures of psychoanalytic thought, anthropology, and British cul-tural studies, within the overall framing provided by the interest inpoststructuralism. They included Benedict Anderson’s extraordinar-ily in›uential re›ections on “the origins and spread of nationalism” inImagined Communities (1983); Ronald Fraser’s oral history of his ownchildhood in the English Home Counties during the 1930s and 1940s,In Search of a Past (1984); Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country(1985), which explored the refashioning of the national past in Britainduring the 1980s and its embedding in the experience of everyday life;The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, by Peter Stallybrass and AlonWhite (1986), which deployed readings of “the high and the low” toconstruct an argument about the shaping of bourgeois sensibilitiesbetween the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, using MikhailBakhtin’s idea of “carnival”; Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a GoodWoman (1986), which used the author’s own autobiography and thelife of her mother to call some of the main tropes of British social his-


tory into question; and Denise Riley’s extended re›ection on theshifting historical indeterminacy of the category of “women” in “Am IThat Name?” (1988).107

None of these works was by a historian in the fully credentialedprofessional sense—that is, someone teaching, researching, and writ-ing inside a university history department. Only one of the authors,Carolyn Steedman, was even trained in history as such, but sheworked ‹rst as a schoolteacher, before being appointed to a post inarts education at the University of Warwick. Otherwise, these emi-nently recognizable historians were trained in political science(Anderson), literature (Fraser, Stallybrass, and White), cultural stud-ies (Wright), and philosophy (Riley). Those with full-time or perma-nent academic positions taught in departments of government(Anderson), cultural and community studies (Stallybrass), Europeanstudies (White), and arts education (Steedman). The rest taught inuniversities at various times but worked as much or mainly outside theacademy altogether, whether as a writer and novelist (Fraser), a jour-nalist (Wright), or a philosopher and poet (Riley). They were all—ifhighly complicatedly and, in Anderson’s case, rather tenuously—British. Fraser (born 1930) and Anderson (born 1936) were older, butthe others had a distinctive history in common: they were bornbetween the late 1940s and early 1950s, shaped by the postwar cul-ture of the welfare state, and formed by both the radicalisms of the1960s and 1970s and the ensuing disappointments.

As the explicit framing of each of these books makes abundantlyclear, the politics animating this generational experience was vitallyimplicated in the new vision of history beginning to emerge. By nomeans all the key elements in the intellectual politics of the 1970s and1980s are captured by this particular selection of people and texts.Their range is heavily Eurocentric and falls patently short of the radi-cal changes in thinking about questions of race, ethnicity, colonialism,and empire (described earlier in this chapter) that were gathering paceduring the same time. A different kind of list might easily begin fromthe publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and the earliest ofthe Subaltern Studies volumes in 1981. It could then continue throughthe Birmingham CCCS’s collective volume The Empire Strikes Back(1982) and Paul Gilroy’s “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (1987),gathering up along the way essays by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha,and Stuart Hall or such books as James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak

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(1985), before culminating in Said’s later Culture and Imperialism(1993).108 But as I’ve already argued, the impact of these departuresbegan materializing in comparable works of history only somewhatlater, more in the 1990s than in the 1980s. Moreover, the argumentsconcerned were far less historically grounded in formal terms thanthose of the books I’ve preferred.109 For a historian mainly workingon Britain and other parts of Western Europe, their impact tooklonger to mature.

What do my preferred works have in common apart from theirprovenance in the borderlands of the discipline? For one thing, noneconform to the historian’s conventional genres of writing, such as thescholarly research monograph or the general survey. They all experi-ment with method and form. Some work through a series of essayisticre›ections, whether ordered in rough and overlapping temporalsequences (Anderson, Riley, Stallybrass and White) or offered simplyas an interconnected cluster of analytical vignettes (Wright). Oth-ers—notably, Fraser and Steedman—play more radically with writ-ing strategies and literary forms, challenging our expectations with avery different kind of design, one that joins the structure of the psy-choanalytic case study to the explanatory architecture of the work ofhistory, or “stories” to “interpretations,” in Steedman’s words.110 Allof them depart from the more familiar rules of evidence. None rely onthe archive in the stricter sense often attributed to professional histo-rians—certainly in the early dissertation stages of their careers or inthe of‹cial hierarchies of disciplinary attainment and prestige, forwhich a proven standing as an “archival scholar” is the necessary ticket.None would pass the test urged by Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of His-tory, with its austere and arid insistence on the primacy of traditionaland narrowly based archival research.111

These authors certainly show no disregard toward archival scholar-ship itself. Elsewhere, Carolyn Steedman has written eloquently aboutthe challenges and pleasures of working in the archive in the practicaldusty old sense.112 These works promote not the abandonment of theprofessional historian’s archival calling or of the established protocolsof archival research but an imaginative broadening of what these canentail. This partly involves recognizing what the conventional archiveis not, or seeing all the things it can never contain. Actually existingarchives aren’t exactly the neutral storehouses of the entirety of thepast record implied by a traditional “objectivist” stance, preserving


history whole or providing direct transmissions from a vanished time.On the contrary, archives are extraordinarily partial and contingentthings. Whether in the of‹cial repositories of state-sanctioned recordkeeping (such as the National Archives or the Public Record Of‹ce),in the many other places where institutional records are kept, or sim-ply in private collections, they are organized around habits and pro-grams of selectivity, through which certain kinds of documents areprivileged while others are rejected or transformed. Througharchives, the past is damaged and spoiled as much as preserved.

The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen doc-umentation from the past and also from the mad fragments thatno one intended to preserve and that just ended up there. . . . Itis indexed, and catalogued, and some of it is not indexed and cat-alogued, and some of it is lost. But as stuff it just sits there untilit is read, and used, and narrativized.113

Thus, conventional archives are not only partial and selective; theyare also inert. This dual insight unsettles all the traditionalist assump-tions about the sovereignty of the archive in the classical objectivistsense. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the resulting implicationscaused no end of trouble for the organizing principles and orderly rou-tines of the professional historian’s imaginary landscape of knowledge.On the one hand, the archive’s documentary contents—the physicaltraces of past times—mean nothing until historians actually set towork on them. Otherwise, the records sit there unused, eitherunknown or the guardians of an assumed understanding, hidden mon-uments to an already established account. On the other hand, archivespossess their own story, embedded in the processes that created them,in the rules and practices governing their administration, and in theaggregate decision making of their staff. Archivists are as much theauthors of what they keep as its preservers. How the documents gotinto the archive—who selected them, how they were organized, howthey were guarded, how they were made available—is every bit ascomplex a question, requiring all the same sophisticated techniques ofdeconstruction, as how the words got onto the page. All the post-structuralist prescriptions, regarding the instabilities of texts, thecomplexities of authorship, and the contingencies of presentation,apply.

The next step in this argument is equally crucial, because “the

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archive” is no longer found only in the physical and discrete institu-tional spaces to which we have usually given the name, the buildingswhere the bundles of ‹les are kept. In the wake of the reception of theideas of Foucault, the archive has also come to function as a metaphor.In the most abstract versions, it refers inde‹nitely to the evidentiaryfoundations for the knowable world. More manageably, it directs usto all the materials surrounding the processes and techniques thatmake the world available for knowledge, that render it graspable orreducible as such. For Foucault, this approach began with his studiesof prisons, asylums, hospitals, and the general “order of things,” but itsoon progressed to an overarching thesis about “governmentality,”embracing the plenitude of practices developed by states for the pur-poses of managing and ruling their populations.

If we start thinking of the archive not just as the physical buildingswhere documents are stored but also as encompassing the widerprocesses—institutional, political, social, cultural, even epistemolog-ical—that de‹ned and produced what the documents contained, someinteresting possibilities emerge. Amid the resulting technologies ofsurveillance and control, statistical knowledge and processes ofclassi‹cation acquired special importance, as did the coalescence ofthe academic disciplines later in the nineteenth century. The argu-ment can then be applied to the institutional domains of policing,schooling, and social administration; it can be pushed further, into theintermediate spaces of the professions and the public sphere; and it canbe extended, thence, to the ground of civil society itself. The imagi-native realms of literature, the arts, and popular culture may also begathered in. Through all the resulting histories came the invention of“the social” or “society” in its distinctive modern sense.

Once we think of the archive like this, as the traces left by thedesire for an intelligible and controllable world (or, more ambi-tiously, by the drives of states for “the ordering of the world and itsknowledges into a uni‹ed ‹eld”),114 the possible forms an archivemight assume for a particular topic or question can dramaticallyexpand. Even considered simply (in practical terms) as places wheredocuments can be stored, archives now greatly diversify in form.They might include “a sound or ‹lm library or a collection of post-cards or a ‹ling cabinet of oral history interviews” as well as theolder types of record keeping or registry.115 But even more, ourunderstanding of what counts as an important or legitimate source


can become blown wide open. Not so long ago, for example, themainstream of the profession kept the practices of oral history res-olutely at bay, on the grounds that oral testimony failed to meet theevidentiary protocols for the integrity of the archive as convention-ally understood. But in the meantime, that epistemological bound-ary, which de‹ned what I called earlier the sovereignty of thearchive, has been decisively breached. The road has been extremelyrapidly traveled from The Cheese and the Worms, through, say, TheReturn of Martin Guerre and Natalie Davis’s later work Fiction in theArchives, to the extremely exciting methodological free-for-all of thepresent.116

This questioning of the conventional archive’s objectivity andsimultaneous broadening of the de‹nition of a permissible sourcewere two of the decisive gains for historians since the 1980s. Theywere intimately connected: being able to recognize the inventivenessand selectivity in the of‹cial keeping of the record, or its necessaryarbitrariness, makes it easier to look elsewhere for the archival basis ofone’s research. This widening of the inventory of possible sources wasbrilliantly captured by Raphael Samuel in Theatres of Memory (quotedearlier in this chapter). Once the historian’s agenda was opened up,the way was cleared for all kinds of research topics, often requiring agreat deal of inventiveness in the search for sources and an ingeniouslycreative approach in reading them.

Thus, the topics available for historians have grown with dizzyingprofusion, to include fashion, shopping, and all aspects of taste, style,and consumption; art, photography, iconography, and visual culture;architecture, landscape, and the environment; drinking, eating, andcigarette smoking; music, dancing, and popular entertainment; histo-ries of gender, tilted more and more toward masculinity; all aspects ofthe history of sexuality; travel and tourism; clothing, furniture, toys,and other objects of commodi‹cation, usefulness, and pleasure; col-lecting and museums; hobbies and enthusiasms; occultism; psychol-ogy, psychiatry, and all areas of medical practice; histories of thebody; and histories of emotions. Most of these topics involve contactwith other disciplines. Conversely, scholars in anthropology, litera-ture, art history, ‹lm studies, and all parts of cultural studies haveturned massively to history during the past two decades—certainly byhistoricizing their perspectives, whether or not they compose theirown archives in ways historians would approve or expect.

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The Subjective Element

While the key works on my list hardly engaged today’s diverse topicsin any detailed or grounded fashion, they challenged us to think dif-ferently about history. They allowed the established terrain of histor-ical research of the social, political, or intellectual historian to be bro-ken down and recomposed. They made possible its decentering.These books were also joined substantively by a number of commoninterests. Benedict Anderson and Patrick Wright were centrally con-cerned with the complexities of national culture, for example, as werethe other authors more obliquely. The terms of modern political iden-tity formed a similar common thread, although only some of theauthors dealt explicitly with the category of modernity per se. Morethan anything else, though, the shared commitment to a history ofmeaning, focused around questions of political subjectivity, linkedthese six works together. This signaled the passage from social historyinto cultural history, in a number of ways.

First and most obviously, this turn to subjectivity has enabled aresurgence of interest in biography. The writing of individual biogra-phies was one of the earliest casualties of the rise of social history dur-ing the 1960s and 1970s. With much justi‹cation, social historians dis-missed the biographical approach as an example of everything in thediscipline that needed modernizing, deriding it as either the benightedtraditionalism of old-fashioned political historians or the trivializingand frivolous recourse of the nonprofessional. The pursuit of struc-tural or broadly contextualized materialist analysis of various kinds, incontrast, became equated with a necessary degree of scholarly seri-ousness. By the 1980s, however, with feminist scholars in the lead,some historians were rethinking this stance. Rather than continuing tosee biography as a simpli‹cation, they reclaimed it for complexity.Individual lives might now be revisited as complex texts in which thesame large questions that inspired the social historians were embed-ded. Only a different range of theory and techniques would berequired. The intersection of elaborate and multiform forces might betraced through and inside a particular life, allowing the generalizedand the abstract to be focused through the personal and the particular.The resulting histories might take the form of a full-scale biography,or the biographical might take its place in a wider repertoire of analy-


sis. The individual life became one of the sites where microhistorycould be practiced.117

Second, the incipient culturalism of the 1980s exhausted existingtheories of ideology. Again, my particular version of this story is per-sonal and begins in the British Marxist debates of the 1970s, as certainclassical and pragmatic applications of the “base and superstructure”metaphor among historians began collapsing under the pressure ofsustained theoretical critique. That critique proceeded from the ideasof Louis Althusser, moved rapidly through an intense engagementwith the thought of Antonio Gramsci, and began responding to thechallenge of feminism. In escaping from a resulting impasse at the endof the 1970s, British Marxists turned increasingly to versions of Fou-cault, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies, while many femi-nists struggled toward theories of sexed and gendered subjectivity.118

Until that time, most social historians tended to approach ideologythrough antinomies of coercion and consent or domination and resis-tance, addressing questions of popular conformity and rebellion froma class-analytic point of view. Under the impact of the new debates,however, the received materialist paradigm of class experience andclass consciousness began to break down. By the mid-1980s, socialhistorians were no longer so con‹dent about the potential translationsfrom oppression and exploitation into forms of collective action. Theystressed instead the contradictory meanings through which classtended to be lived. Whether in exploring the ambivalence of individ-uals or grasping “how patterns of dependency, paternalism, [and] def-erence were reproduced in other contexts in the wider society,” theclassical Marxist causalities of class relations and class consciousnessno longer held.119 Other approaches to subjectivity came due.

Third, the turn to subjectivity was borne by the ur-feminist axiomof the late 1960s and early 1970s, “the personal is political.” At onelevel, it registered the latest stage in the working through of one of theprimary problems in women’s history—namely, the relationshipbetween family, domesticity, and intimate life, on the one hand, andthe public worlds of politics, on the other. If the marginalizing ofwomen from political power had always encouraged feminist histori-ans to seek female voices elsewhere—in family and household, in theeducation of children, in religion, in the pleasures of consumption andentertainment, in all the unspectacular spaces of the everyday—the

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same linkage of the personal to the political now formed the key start-ing point for each of the works under discussion. How could individ-ual subjectivities be sutured to larger political identities and loyalties,such as the nation or a class? Again, this was a two-way street: throughsuch processes, individuals might be constrained and imprisoned aswell as enabled or set free. We might invent identities from our ownimmediately lived experiences or fashion agency through our intimateencounters with the concretely experienced social actualities ofinequality and difference. But we could do so only by living out andappropriating the consequences of scripts written and codi‹ed else-where.

Fourth, psychoanalysis vitally in›uenced the theorizing of exactlythese questions. At an early stage of the discussions, in the 1980s,Timothy Ashplant usefully summarized this starting point: “Twopoints in particular stood out: the relationship between the inner psy-chic realm studied by psychoanalysis and the external world studied byhistory; and the role of language as mediating between thesemoments.”120 Of course, even as the validation and critique of lan-guage by psychoanalysis was being upheld, linguistic analysis itself wasbecoming problematized via deconstruction and the resulting “crisis ofinterpretation.”121 Such emerging complexities notwithstanding, psy-choanalysis promised strategies for dealing with a number of social history’s abiding problems. It answered the lack of a theory of theindividual subject, which neither Marxism nor other materialist soci-ologies had managed to address. It recognized the power of the emo-tional drives and resistances behind social and political movements.Most important of all, it acknowledged the elusiveness and opacity ofthe relationship between an originating event and the resulting cir-cumstances or putative outcomes. This emphasis on “undecidability”and the associated dialectics of memory and forgetting helped under-mine the social historian’s given assumptions about causality. Thisapplied most palpably to the books by Fraser, Steedman, andRiley.122

Fifth, conceding the elusiveness of the relationship to the originat-ing event expands the instigating role of the historian’s own questionsand the relevance of the standpoints from which they are asked. Thisbrings the historian into his or her own text, while emphasizing thepresent tense of the historian’s voice.


To begin to construct history, the writer has to do two things,make two movements through time. First of all, we need tosearch backwards from the vantage point of the present in orderto appraise things in the past and attribute meaning to them.When events and entities in the past have been given their mean-ing in this way, then we can trace forward what we have alreadytraced backwards, and make a history.123

This is not really a “presentism” in the earlier and more directlypoliticized 1960s sense, in which the sloganeering of a “usable past”sought to erect “relevance” into an ethical prerequisite for historianswanting to place themselves on the left. Rather, it invites a certainself-re›ectiveness when faced with the raw and unmediated inertnessof the past, including an honesty in openly constructing one’s stand-point and a willingness to acknowledge the shifting and provisionalbases from which the questions can only ever be asked. This perspec-tivalism is not exactly without precedent, and there are many fore-tastes in the classics of historiographical commentary. But since the1980s, more working historians have become more conscious of itsforce for more of their time than ever before. It is scarcely possible toavoid encountering the practical and theoretical dilemmas it brings. Insome history departments, it supplies the very air we breathe.

Finally, for all of these departures, feminism was absolutely crucial.The pioneering women’s histories of the seventies were rarely noticedby the leading social historians, who were issuing their classic mani-festos of advocacy and crisis. But feminist histories from the eightieswere unavoidably at the forefront of the cultural turn. This was some-thing fundamentally new. Earlier, women’s history had been so effec-tively sidelined into a discrete sub‹eld, conceptualized via “separatespheres” and subsumed into the history of the family, that even suchavowedly feminist syntheses as Tilly and Scott’s Women, Work, andFamily did little to break it out. If one’s ‹eld happened to be speci‹ckinds of labor history, the history of the family, or certain kinds ofsocial reform, feminist critiques could hardly be ignored; otherwise,women’s history could be left safely to its own devices. However,once feminists started insisting on gender as a dimension of all humantransactions, collective and individual, the situation decisivelychanged. It started to seem that if sexual differences were variably and

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contingently ordered, in contestable as well as stable and normalizingways, always implicating differences of power, with relevance acrossall the fronts of social, cultural, and political life, then the feministchallenge could no longer be quite as easily contained.

Carolyn Steedman

In many respects, Carolyn Steedman (born 1947) seems to exemplifythe arguments I’ve been making about the changes in the disciplinebetween the 1960s and now. She certainly began with her feet planted‹rmly in the post-Thompsonian social history of the late 1960s,attending the University of Sussex as an undergraduate in 1965–68and completing a Cambridge doctoral thesis entitled “The Formationof English Provincial Police Forces, 1856–1880,” published in 1984 asPolicing the Victorian Community.124 Yet ever since Landscape for a GoodWoman and later works appeared, she’s been known mainly as a lead-ing cultural historian.125 With respect to another part of my argu-ment, moreover, she worked as a historian completely on the outside.While joining the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal in1984 and moving in the associated circles of women’s historians, fem-inist educators, and history workshoppers, she did so with no connec-tion to any university history department. She worked as a primaryschool teacher during 1974–81, spent two years at a research projecton bilingualism in early education at the London Institute of Educa-tion, and took an appointment in arts education at the University ofWarwick in 1984. For ten years, she researched and wrote as a histo-rian, with widening international resonance but no relationship to herown university’s history department. Only in 1994 did she join thelatter, with a personal chair. In other words—not unlike other femi-nist historians of this generation in Britain—she became a leading his-torian entirely outside the institutional and professional precincts ofhistory as a discipline.126

Landscape for a Good Woman shaped Steedman’s reputation as a his-torian. By now, the book has already been much written about anddiscussed, not only by historians, but also by scholars in literature,anthropology, women’s studies, and gender studies—indeed, acrossthe whole cultural studies map. The book holds appeal for anyoneinterested in the history of autobiography and the forms of writing; in


histories of class and childhood; in the lives written for women andgirls (and boys and men) by the main scripts of a culture; in the post-1945 histories of welfare and improvement; in the receding historicalimaginary of an older Left; in the still unwritten histories of desire,envy, and longing; or in the enormous complexities of writing a his-tory of the self and subjectivity since the eighteenth century. At thesame time, Landscape is a highly personal and idiosyncratic work. Itfunctioned for its author as part of a certain learning process thatallowed big questions to be worked through, though more epistemo-logically than in the therapeutic terms we might assume. Steedmanwas interested, above all, in clarifying the difference between historyand the other kinds of stories we tell.

As with the treatments of Edward Thompson and Tim Mason thatclose the previous two chapters of this book, my reasons for herefocusing on Carolyn Steedman’s book are autobiographical. Reading itplayed a key part in my own encounter with the intellectual shifts I’mdescribing. I could also tell my own convergent set of stories. Likemyself, for example, Landscape’s author belongs to the generationinspired by Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. I mightlikewise describe parallel journeys through the safe but dispiritingsocial and cultural landscapes of the long postwar, whose genealogiesof migration and marginality, validation and denial, would look quitefamiliar. I was also a child of the welfare state. The book’s re›ectionson English childhoods could, to a great extent, be mine. In otherrespects, of course, our stories would be quite different. Most obvi-ously, I was a boy and not a girl, and through that particular differ-ence, Steedman elaborates an original and searching series of argu-ments about the gendered narratives of class disadvantage andaspiration. Among these, she composes a kind of “counter-coun-ternarrative” of impaired popular democracy, intended to work delib-erately against Thompson’s oppositional counternarrative of the malelabor movement, offered so eloquently in The Making. If, in the end,Steedman destabilizes and reenables the latter rather than overturningit, her critique is no less far-reaching for that. Moreover, I chooseSteedman’s book precisely because of its gendered standpoint: by farthe most effective challenge to the given materialisms of social historyduring the 1980s came from feminists.

Steedman’s book used her own and her mother’s stories to chal-lenge some of our main scenarios of modern British history and,

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indeed, to argue against some of the primary ways in which historiestend to be written—not only the historical presentation of particulartopics (such as childhood, motherhood, or class), but also the veryprocess through which historical accounts are conventionally puttogether. As a formal structure, her book disobeyed all the rules. Itranged back and forth between different parts of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, between historical works and types of ‹ction,between history and psychoanalysis, between the personal and thepolitical, and between individual subjectivity and the dominant avail-able narratives of a culture, whether in historiography or politics,grand theory or cultural beliefs, psychoanalysis or feminism. Ratherthan relating the many particular arguments in the book, though, Iwant to highlight four speci‹c features.

First, the book’s use of the personal voice was immensely liberat-ing. This was partly due to its freedom of form, its refusal of linearnarrative; it moved back and forth between Steedman’s personal his-tory, the extensive repertoire of historical knowledges needed toshape it, and the forms of grand theory and types of determinism thatwould otherwise have ‹xed its available meanings so easily into place.In method, Steedman assembled a case history, giving us what shecalled “the bits and pieces from which psychological selfhood ismade.”127 Among historians, her use of the personal voice was highlyunusual. For those on the left, it struck a particular chord. It autho-rized re›ectiveness at a time when my generation was experiencing arange of uncertainties and disappointments—concerning both theforms of social history we’d expected might explain the world and thetypes of politics we thought could change it. As I’ve argued through-out this book, both kinds of optimism were always intimately yokedtogether.

Second, those disappointments were about the collapse of grandnarratives—or, rather, about the inability of existing grand narrativesto capture either the directions of contemporary societal change or thediversity of past historical experience. In this respect, Steedmanoffered a history radically and disconcertingly at variance with theaccounts we knew. She told a story of working-class lives that didn’t‹t; that didn’t belong in the available scripts of socialism, the postwardemocracy of opportunity, and the solidarities of working-class cul-ture; and that couldn’t easily be reconciled with the familiar frame-works of social history and cultural studies. Steedman’s story was


about a mother who didn’t want to mother, a patriarchy without apatriarch, and forms of longing and desire, envy and exclusion, thatspilled outside the acceptable frames of class and gender conscious-ness. Even more, it was about historians’ inability—and unwilling-ness—to develop a language for dealing with personal longings. It wasabout what she called “lives lived out on the borderlands . . . for whichthe central interpretive devices of the culture don’t quite work.”128

Third, at the same time that it focused a rhetorically “personal” self,Steedman’s book constantly reengaged the terms of the “big picture.”In making the argument for the value of a case history—for one ver-sion of a microhistory, perhaps—she remained committed to thelargest ideas of societal persistence and change, to the most abstracttheses about modern subjectivity, and to the biggest of the overarch-ing frameworks of capitalism and its social relations. She refused todwell exclusively inside the minutiae of personal experience and indi-vidual lives instead of moving out to the larger-scale questions ofhuman history (where the present book began, with Edward Thomp-son and Tim Mason). On the one hand, Steedman focused on thoseplaces where history and culture meet subjectivity, to explore howsuch encounters could be converted into a sense of the self. On theother hand, she showed the ability of the given social and culturalenvironment to consign some types of selfhood to the margins. Inshowing us “the fragmented and ambivalent nature of experience andself,” Steedman’s case study exposed “the precariousness of theory andclass consciousness when it fails to incorporate the wants and needs ofthe individuals—especially the women—within it.”129

Fourth, Landscape contains a meditation about “history” in preciselythe disciplinary sense—as a type of intellectual practice, a mode ofinquiry with materials and rules, a process of cognition, a genre ofwriting. This is partly an issue of “the archive” in the sense I’ve alreadydiscussed, involving “the massive authority” bestowed on “a story-teller” by history’s “appeal to the evidence”—meaning, as Steedmanputs it, “the pleasures of the plot shaped according to what the docu-ments forbid, or authorize, but which they never contain in them-selves.”130 But Steedman also asked what distinguishes history as akind of writing from other literary or narrative forms, including let-ters and diaries, novels, autobiographies, and Freudian case studies.What does it permit, and what does it impede or disavow? Her answerexplained history as a mode of cognition based on temporality, whose

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narratives are ordered around “time and causal connection.” It rests ona “basic historicity,” where “knowledge of chronology and time”inhere.131

Two additional arguments followed from this claim. One con-cerned the inde‹nite and unattainable plenitude of “the way it reallywas,” or the abstract generality of everything the past theoreticallycontains, the totality historians can never hope to retrieve.

It seems probable that history cannot work as either cognition ornarrative without the assumption on the part of the writer andthe reader . . . that there is somewhere the great story, that con-tains everything there is and ever has been—“visits home, heart-beats, a ‹rst kiss, the jump of an electron from one orbital posi-tion to another,” as well as the desolate battle‹eld, the ruinedvillage—from which the smaller story, the one before your eyesnow, has simply been extracted.132

From the same inde‹niteness, then, comes the argument of historicalwriting’s openness and instability. Unlike stories claiming complete-ness, such as autobiographies or novels, historical writing is based on“a recognition of temporariness and impermanence.” Historicalinquiry “is constructed around the understanding that things are notover, that the story isn’t ‹nished: that there is no end.” Desires forexhaustiveness and ‹nality nothwithstanding, new evidence and argu-ments will always be found; new accounts can always be made. Thus,histories allow for change. Indeed, they have the idea of changeinscribed in them: “The telling of a life story is a con‹rmation of that selfthat stands there telling the story. History, on the other hand, mightoffer the chance of denying it.”133

In the two decades since Landscape appeared, Steedman has contin-ued exploring these themes, returning with particular consistency tothe history of the modern idea of childhood, or, rather, to the episte-mological work such an idea has been asked to perform. That work isintimately connected to ideas about history. In the course of the nine-teenth century, she argues, the desire to see an individual’s childhood“as the buried past, the place that is there, within us, but never to beobtained,” acquired epistemological equivalence with the equallymodern idea that history could be captured through the documenta-tion assembled into an archive. This homology then perdured, even asthe discipline of history began securing its own increasingly separate


institutional credentials: “This understanding of the individual humansubject was examined and expressed in many forms of writing in thenineteenth century, from the scienti‹c treatise to slush ‹ction, thoughit was growth studies—the popularized physiology of the mid-cen-tury—that put new formulations of human insideness—of having aninside, a space within: an interiority—on the cultural agenda.” Thisunderstanding of the self—of human subjectivity, its inner constitu-tion, its developmental coordinates, and its burial beneath experi-ence, requiring forms of archaeology to be retrieved—shaped a vital‹eld of interconnections between the modern idea of childhood andthinking about social and political identity. It delivered an “imagina-tive structure” that allowed individuals to explore the sources of theirown self while connecting the resulting descriptions and insights tothe larger social world and, thence, to the world of public affairs.134

This way of understanding childhood, as “a mapping of analogy andmeaning for the self,” which simultaneously inserted actual childreninto the symbolic landscape of the social world, not only offered akind of template for re›ecting on the pastness where individual presents were embedded (“history” in commonsense and everydaymeanings) but also stood more generally for the nineteenth century’sevolving ideas about the origins of the self.135 Throughout, as herrecurring trope of the “Little Watercress Girl” suggests, Steedman isinterested less in the real worlds of children than in the place requiredof the child in the social thought, moral philosophy, and political the-ory of the capitalist West.136 From Rousseau to Freud, the ‹gure ofthe child became emblematic for the entailments of the effort at imag-ining the good society, a central organizing metaphor for how wethink about the possibilities of shaping or transforming the socialworld and, therefore, about the movements of history. No one haswritten more brilliantly than Steedman—analogically, hermeneuti-cally, or epistemologically—about this complex ‹eld of meaningscrystallized by the idea of childhood.

When considered with another of her main themes—the relation-ship of modern forms of writing to the making of the self and to theallied concept of interiority—this focus helps engage precisely thosequestions of political subjectivity that proved so troubling for socialhistory’s earlier optimism. Indeed, during the past three decades,Steedman has returned consistently to the histories of modern subjec-tivity, focusing, in particular, on the possibilities for self-fashioning

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allowed by various kinds of writing and public performance.137 Thelatter include not only particular genres—novels, diaries, the episto-lary form, private copybooks, conduct books, political tracts, socialreportage, speaking from public platforms, storytelling, the Bil-dungsroman, biographies, guides for teachers—but also very excep-tional texts Steedman happens to have encountered, from John Pear-man’s autobiography and the story of The Tidy House to a nine-year-oldEnglish Punjabi girl’s singing of a storybook.138 Some of the resultingnarratives proved productive for larger public scripts, feeding (forgood or ill) into the Left’s progressivist political programs during thetwentieth century.139 Others, like the “radical soldier’s tale” or“Amarjit’s song,” were either not noticed, directly disregarded, orsilently co-opted—expropriated, in fact—by the dominative scriptsof others.

As Steedman observes, this uncertain process of narrative absorp-tion applies also to works of history, including even—or perhapsespecially—such great inspirational epics of social history as Thomp-son’s Making of the English Working Class, around which Steedmandevelops a typically original and dissentient reading. The time-boundpartialness of Thompson’s account wasn’t only a matter of the absenceof women or his masculinist conception of class. Thompson’s moreserious omission, Steedman argues, concerned the constitutiveimportance that a speci‹cally feminized story of sensibility, sexualrelationships, and suffering held for the social relations and politicaltheory of the very process of class formation he wanted to describe.This is precisely the story—archetypal, scripted, diffused into a sensi-bility, discursively elaborated as ideology—that the collective agencyimagined for the workingman-as-citizen fundamentally presupposed.For this claim, Steedman draws not only on her own arguments aboutthe history of subjectivity, with its growing eighteenth-century associ-ations of cultivated interiority, but also on a broader historiographyconcerned with the power of a popular “melodramatic vision” and itsempathy for the “suffering self.”

As Thompson wanted to tell the story of The Making, Steedmanaverred, “men come to new political subjectivities in community andcollectivity through understanding the meaning of the suffering andexploitation they have experienced.”140 His telling took an avowedlyheroic form that was intended to inspire and did. Yet how do we dealwith those workers—men as well as women—who would never have


found themselves in his version of the story, or how do we deal withthose parts of life it omitted to describe? While The Making “is indeedan epic tale,” it’s also one “which most experience of the men who actas its heroes cannot actually have ‹tted (or cannot actually have ‹ttedall of the time).”141 At the heart of Thompson’s account remains astartling lacuna: in this period, “the structures of feeling that Thomp-son delineates, the melodramatic mechanism by which social and selfknowledge promotes political revelation, was bound up with the fem-inine and was almost exclusively ‹gured by a woman and herstory.”142 At some level, Thompson knew this. Yet within the coordi-nates of the time—the materialist sensibility, the registers ofsigni‹cance and recognition, the learned idioms of politics, the avail-able languages of social history—he wasn’t able to tell that story.143

Some years ago, as Steedman suggested to the 1990 Urbana-Cham-paign Cultural Studies Conference, Thompson’s book had alreadybegun entering that “transitional stage” in the life of a work of writtenhistory, when it ceases being used primarily for “its overt subject mat-ter” and starts acquiring a documentary status of its own. It beganturning more and more into the repository of the complex sequenceof contemporary intellectual, social, and political histories it hadpartly enabled, becoming a kind of palimpsest of all the interveninghopes and disappointments—“an epic telling of a history that wewatch with wonder and pity, that is also now, in our reading, about us,and our lost past.” Of course, the book retains a great deal of its ear-lier substantive value—as “a quarry of information about class forma-tion, the actual meeting of actual men under cover of darkness onmoors six miles beyond Hudders‹eld, and the language they used inconsciousness of their making a new political world.” But at the sametime, The Making’s impermanence now ineluctably supervenes.

Too much has happened for this to operate as a simple historicalsource; there are too many new items of information—aboutwhat women were doing, at that moment, back in Hudders‹eld,about all the men who were not present at their own class for-mation, all those who did not “specially want it to happen . . .”;about recent events in Eastern Europe; about all our lostsocialisms.144

Steedman’s corpus—from The Tidy House and Landscape, throughher writings on John Pearman and Margaret McMillan, to Strange Dis-

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locations and Dust—struggles continuously with this legacy of Thomp-son and the wider ensemble of associated progressivist thought.145

Her work challenges those received understandings by seeking torecuperate all the subjectivities they’ve neglected or disavowed; sheuses these other stories—for example, her mother’s or John Pear-man’s (and, of course, her own)—to subvert the older narratives. Stillmore, she reconstructs the overall “structures of feeling” (to use Ray-mond Williams’s term) through which a certain ideal of interiority,associated ideas of femininity and childhood, and a set of presumptionsregarding family, sexuality, and personal life were able to grounddominant ways of thinking about culture and politics since the mid-eighteenth century. At the same time, she remains constantly atten-tive to the processes that can bring individuals to a change in their self-understanding, in particular to the point where they can see throughthe power of the “pre‹gurative script” in order to craft the narrativesof their lives.146 She asks: How do we ‹nd ourselves in the landscape?How do we place ourselves historically inside our own story?

Does this make Carolyn Steedman into a “new cultural historian”?If that designation is earned by an interest in questions of meaning,language, and subjectivity, the answer is clearly yes. But none ofSteedman’s books actually depart the ground of social history, andmost make a point of reaf‹rming it. Most of them speci‹cally combineinterpretive approaches with the contextualizing analysis and archiveof the social historian. Do Steedman’s essays “Englishness, Clothes,and Little Things” or “What a Rag Rug Means” deliver cultural history,social history, literary history, intellectual history, or something elseentirely?147 The question seems immaterial. In answer to her own cri-tique of Thompson, moreover, Steedman is now working on theproblem of service, servitude, and servants in exactly the period cov-ered by his book. In the most basic of social historical terms—by anycriteria, domestic servants formed one of the key working categoriesof the later eighteenth century—this subject is patently essential toboth the history of working-class formation and the new discourse ofpolitical economy.148 Does that spell “cultural history” or the “historyof society”? What is the force of the distinction?

Steedman is better described as a historian who understands thetheoretical and philosophical implications of doing historical work.She pushes edgily on the boundaries of what historians think they do,but she manages to combine social and cultural history without turn-


ing the results into some risk-free and reassuring middle way. Sheaddresses the insuf‹ciencies and exclusions of a class-centeredapproach to social history, but she does not abandon the standpoint of“class” altogether. She makes the “cultural turn” without waving good-bye to “the social.” She resists the tyranny of grand narratives withoutsuccumbing to an excessively deconstructed identity. Finally, byacknowledging the very historicity of all subjectivities, she exposes thefalseness of the dichotomy between the “social” and the “cultural” inthe ‹rst place. That is what we should take away from reading Steed-man’s work: between social history and cultural history, there is reallyno need to choose.

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iv. reflectiveness

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